


Maiden Rose: The Final Chapters

by Dionys



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: A new commander, A new cycle, Abduction, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Assassination Plot(s), Atomic Bomb Disease, Betrayal, Caught between worlds, Civil War, Cold War, Complex global politics, Facial scar, Klaus is more patient, Klaus suffers in silence, Klaus' nephew is a mini-Klaus, Loyalty, M/M, Master/Servant, Mutiny, Nostalgia, Nuclear Weapons, Possessive Taki, Questions of destiny, Questions of happiness, Revolution, Sexual Dysfunction, Sexual Repression, Shameless Smut, Smut, Spies & Secret Agents, Taki is more expressive, Unrequited Love, War, Wolves in heat (metaphorically), World War III, morphine addiction, post-war tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-05-17 20:18:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 70
Words: 461,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5884132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dionys/pseuds/Dionys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"Have you ever asked him? What it’s like to have given everything up for you?"</em>
</p><p>PART 1: A stranger from the west, and from Klaus' past, is suddenly thrown in their midst, promising a swift end to the war if he can be granted one wish: to become Taki Reizen's second knight.</p><p>PART 2: On the other side of the sky. Klaus, Taki and a cottage with a rose garden.</p><p>PART 3: Ten years after the war, there's a new commander at the Fifteenth Armoured Division. And Klaus fights his most daunting foe to date.</p><p>[Continuation of manga, since mangaka went on hiatus... Come back to us Inariya-sama!]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_Klaus,_

_My knight. You have endured well._

_It will be a long time before you forgive yourself. I hope you understand that this was far beyond your reach. I hope you understand how much it meant to me that you tried nevertheless. I saw how much you tried every day and how much it took from you._

_We both carried our burdens. Yours was mine. And mine was the fear that by dying, I was slowly killing you. In mind, if not in body, you were wasting away. For a while, I had no hope._

_And then one day, he appeared as if by magic among the golden stalks outside._

_As I'm writing, you are outside instructing Haruki on the harvest. The sun is blinding on the swaying fields and he has just thrown his pack to the ground for a rest, despite all of his bravado only twenty minutes ago. You are standing with your hands on your hips not far from where you first encountered him a few days ago. There is a smile on your face that I know well but have not seen in recent memory. Though it is hard to explain why, your laughter makes it so that I can finally feel the breeze that has moved these stalks for months._

_In only a few days, young Haruki has lifted my burden. It may even appear that he has lifted yours, though I fear in reality that yours is yours alone to bear._

_Forgive me, Klaus. Forgive me for being unable to give you more. Whether by design or by circumstance, even at our closest, I was always far away. There is a terrible power in words and deeds, in the commandments carved in me since birth and the vows that have shadowed my every footstep even as far as this soft, golden land. It is so strong that I cannot conclude whether it is a force from within or without – a lightning strike from the Gods themselves. Whatever the case, I could never give myself to you the way you wanted. The way I wanted._

_But already I can see in him all of what I could not give. There is more in him than even he knows. You have to help him find it._

_The days are changing. I can feel it now in the murmurs on the street, murmurs which have been carried on the wind from my land where a great change is taking place. Commander Haruki Yamamoto will not have the same fog woven around him that I had. He will see with the eyes of the young. He will see it all clearly. You and he will be able to build a new world together._

_Please listen, my knight. For these are my last commands to you:_

_You will want to stay on these fields and die with me. You cannot._

_You will want to deny him because of me. You must not._

_You were born to be a knight._ _You were born to be at your commander's side._

_And you must know, though I could not express it before, that you have made me happier than I ever thought possible._

_It is your turn now. Go to him._

_Yours,_

_Taki_

* * *

Suguri took a step back when he noticed the letter was shaking in Klaus' hand. He was still hunched over it, a thatch of hair keeping his face hidden from view. Out of nowhere, it made Suguri think back to a day when he called him a hulking lout.

Very slowly, almost as though a divine string was being pulled against his will, Klaus looked up. Suguri held back a gasp. The wild anger in his gaze was something Suguri was used to. The streaming tears were not.

'How?' Klaus began in a low rumble. 'How could you keep this from me for two whole fucking _years?'_

The shed was silent. It sat discreetly amidst cicada trills. A feline shadow skirted over the cracked shingle roof.

Somewhere far in the distance, the first grenade tore the air apart. Having travelled miles to reach the shed, the sound was reduced to a dry, unassuming thud. Both men knew what it meant as clearly as if they saw the explosion before their eyes. But neither moved.


	2. I Could Win this Whole Goddamn War

**PART 1** :  **HANS REGENWALDE**

**  
_TEN YEARS EARLIER_ **

'Well, that sure was confusing.'

Klaus folded his legs liberally atop Taki's workspace, superimposing fresh boot prints onto the latest field targets.

He and Taki were alone in the office. Beyond the curtain, a red, mournful sun slowly sank from view. The last of the platoons' marching drills were finishing up on the lawn below. Taki watched the men trot in double file, rounding the corner towards the barracks.

Behind him, Klaus let out a long, luxurious sigh as though finally coming to rest after a lifetime of struggles. But his smile still lingered. 

Klaus knew the sigh was undeserving. He knew in his bones that there was still a great deal ahead of him. He and Taki had only just clambered out of the latest of crevasses that opened without much warning. 

And Taki, though closer now, closer since the small hurricane brought about by Katsuragi and the visitors from Eurote, was still distant. Still, somehow, out of reach.

And of course, there was the war. Always the war.

But, for now, he and Taki were alive and alone and together. And that was all that mattered.

Golden eyes simmering, he took a moment to absorb the sight of his young master at the window. His stillness and seriousness. And he suddenly felt the need to lift the mood.

'Don't know about you,' he continued, lacing his hands behind his head, 'but I found it hard as fuck to follow the politics. I mean, cats against wolves was simple enough. And I understood the part where one of the wolves joined sides with the leader cat. I even followed when it turned out the wolf was a traitor all along even when he pledged himself to the leader cat. That was a heart wrencher, wasn't it? But I lost the plot when some fishy cat lady turned up seeking asylum and then it turned out some of the cats were trying to oust their leader cat in a complex cat mutiny and then the leader cat himself was suspected of some kind of subterfuge and then all hell broke loose –'

'It's been dealt with,' Taki reminded him evenly. 'We have real matters to attend to. Like winning the war.'

He slid the field drawings out from beneath Klaus' heel and sat down. Klaus flashed him a wicked grin.

'At least,' he said, 'there was plenty of wolf-on-cat action. That held my attention.'

Taki remained unruffled.

Privately, however, he considered Klaus in mute wonder. The 'politics' as Klaus had so casually coined it, had hijacked the past few harrowing weeks. Everything had been called into question. Everything had come very close to falling apart.* Klaus himself had been shaken to the core several times. And yet here he was, hands behind his head and anthropomorphising without a care in the world.

Taki felt a rare and dangerous urge to smile. He controlled the impulse easily enough.

'Hasebe sorted through the latest intelligence on the Western Alliance frontlines,' he said, turning his attention to the papers. 'We need to discuss the next offensive, especially the movement of the first and second lines of tanks.'

Klaus wondered how much noise a nest of crumpled field drawings would make as he ground Taki's body into them. He imagined knuckles gripping the edge of the desk and splayed hair and muffled cries. His cock twitched.

He lined up an interruption that contained a perfect balance of military relevance and sexual innuendo when Hasebe burst through the door.

'Commander, the Alliance is retreating in Dheedene.'

Klaus sighed and shifted conspicuously in his seat.

Hasebe and two other decorated officers whose names Klaus had never bothered to learn bore down on the table.

'They've left the outer towns and part of the northwest border entirely unguarded'. Hasebe threw telegrams onto the table. 'It looks like surrender.'

There was a pause as Taki read through the telegrams.

'Why?'

'I beg your pardon, sir?'

'Why are they surrendering? Why now?'

'We're not sure, sir.'

Taki sifted through the drawings on his desk to find those of the northwest border. He frowned over them and the recent telegrams. This was the fifth retreat of its kind in the past month. He knew that the Western Alliance had been fighting a war on two fronts and that the home front was proving, in its own way, to be tougher. Riots, picketing, strikes and boycotts in almost all of the Allied nations had strained the governments' resources on the war effort. Perhaps they were feeling it on the front lines.

Perhaps, gods willing, they would lose.

Klaus watched Taki's impassive face and wondered what was happening behind the scenes.

'I want a full sweep of the area with bomb detectors before anyone moves in,' Taki said eventually. 'I don't want to take any chances. This could be a ploy.'

'It's a bit early in the game for a Trojan Horse manoeuvre isn't it?' said Klaus.

'And what would you know about military strategy, Wolfstadt?' Hasebe said irritably, hands behind his back. He spoke to the far wall but his resentment towards Klaus was palpable.

'I'm just saying it seems unlikely –'

'If I understand correctly, your military expertise involves throwing grenades from your bike like a madman.'

'Speaking of,' said Klaus, lowering his legs to the ground and staring pointedly at Hasebe. 'I have a theory that my technique, which you so graciously brought up, may have contributed to the entire Western Alliance retreat.'

Hasebe finally turned to him. 'And how the hell do you figure that?'

* * *

_LAST WEEK, ON THE FRONT LINES_

'Klaus –'

'No.'

'Klaus, I said turn around and help Akiyama's battalion on the eastern flank.'

'And I said no, Commander. Is this thing even working?'

Taki watched the wayward blip on his radar with growing frustration. A whistling sound careened overhead and exploded not far from their tank. Murakumo suddenly began to echo with metallic rattles which were promptly silenced as their spotter took out the shooters. And still the blip moved in the wrong direction.

'Listen to me. Akiyama needs immediate –'

'Akiyama needs to immediately pull his head out of his ass. He'll be fine, the third battalion is nearby, they'll get to him soon enough.'

'Commander! Leiutenant Manoto is reporting heavy losses on the northern bank and is requesting retreat.'

Taki turned to the lieutenant who had spoken and gave the retreat order with a sinking feeling.

'I'm heading for the bridge near where you are,' Klaus went on. He had managed to retain his arrogant drawl even over the roar in the background. 'They're pouring in from there and most of the defences are trained against your tanks.'

Taki gritted his teeth. Second Lieutenant Azusa to his left, who was listening to every word of the exchange on the radio, watched the commander warily. He was familiar with the strange dynamic between Taki and Captain Wolfstadt, including the staggering level of insubordination which Taki tolerated. But he was worried that this may, yet again, spell the end of the Mad Dog.

'There's too many of them there,' Taki insisted.

'They won't notice a lone bike. Look at them, they're all too busy trying to blow you into the sky. I'm just going to sneak in there and leave them a little surprise.'

'Don't do it. That's an order.'

There was a noise over the transceiver that could have been a scoff or a laugh.

'Look, Taki, we can do this whole bit where you give me an order and I defy it and you warn me not to and I do it anyway. Or we can skip to the part where –'

A huge explosion nearby threw Taki off balance. The tank held its ground and the men scrambled back onto their seats. Taki met Azusa's eye as he readjusted his headset. He was aware that he was holding his breath as Azusa scanned the airwaves.

A crackle. And then: 'Where I blow up all these bastards and you thank me.'

The spotter confirmed it. Three tanks destroyed, heavy losses on the bridge, and the beginnings of a retreat. Roaring towards them away from it all was a motorbike and billowing tan coat.

'And that,' came Klaus' voice. 'Was with the nine grenades I had left. Imagine if I had all twenty. I could win this whole goddamn war.'

Taki closed his eyes.

'All tanks report to the Ouran Bridge,' he said, switching frequencies. 'Enemy is retreating.'

* * *

_BACK IN THE OFFICE_

'So you got lucky with your little stunt,' spat Hasebe. 'So what?'

'Did you know, Grand Chamberlain,' Klaus said airily, 'that since my little stunt, there have been reports of commanders across all the front lines deploying more single-vehicle offensives? Mostly on motorbikes?'

Hasebe pressed his lips together.

'Maybe throwing grenades from a bike like a mad man should be our primary strategy. It's done better than any of your suggestions to date. Just saying.'

'That will be all,' said Taki, sensing danger. 'Hasebe, deliver the order. Tell Uemura I'll brief him tomorrow. We'll reconvene in the morning.'

* * *

'Is it possible that we might win?' Taki mused aloud as he sat heavily on his bed.

Klaus threw back the last of his scotch, enjoying the burning in the back of his throat.

'Did you not think we could?'

'Not so soon,' said Taki. 'It just seems too easy.'

Klaus watched him carefully. Though there was more to everything Taki said, there was especially more to what he didn't say. Klaus had been the Commander's shadow for long enough to hear that he was indeed admitting his doubts they would ever win. This meant, on a yet deeper level, he was admitting he didn't think they ever had a chance at happiness. On the lowest level there was, it meant he didn't think they deserved happiness.

'Your conduct at the bridge last week was military insubordination on every level,' Taki said coolly. 'You know how severe the punishment can be.'

Klaus smiled at his glass. Hasebe had gotten to him. 'I always had the feeling I was beyond military reproach.'

'You're not beyond _my_ reproach.'

'That's my point. I can't be court martialled. But if you see fit to punish me, I have to take it. I just know you won't.'

Taki glared. 'How dare you presume –'

'Not if it involves something like what happened on the bridge,' said Klaus gently. 'Where I'm your eyes on the ground and I can make the right call. You need to trust me.'

Taki said nothing. He stared at his linked hands.

The ice cubes clinked together as Klaus set the glass down. Taki's bedroom was swimming in dull blue light. Over the past few minutes the moon had drifted in and out of clouds, occasionally lifting details and textures out of dark corners. Klaus inhaled deeply. There were never any flowers in here. And yet…

He glanced over at the curtain against which they had held each other what felt like a lifetime ago. They had just held each other, Klaus thought with a smirk, like a pair of lovesick teenagers. He remembered how it had felt like a wave rolling from somewhere behind his solar plexus and reaching out to his extremities. Before then, he had always believed that sex was the most transformative thing that one could subject both mind and body to. And yet, during the past few months when loyalties had been called into question and a dark grey cloud descended, he didn't find himself thinking about the sex. He thought about the curtain.

 _Then again_ , he reflected as he took in the sight of Taki sitting on his bed wearing only a vacant expression and shirt sleeves. He thought of their exertions on the train from the west.  _T_ _he sex was pretty damn good too._

Crossing the room in a few slow strides, he put one knee on the bed and gently tugged Taki's head back by his hair. There it was, the steely, determined gaze that Klaus had witnessed in Taki's office. Now it was trained on him, mixed with a familiar defiance. That look alone was magic for his cock.

To Klaus' credit, the kiss was gentle at first. His tongue sought out Taki's slowly, coaxingly. But when he found it, when it combined with the scent that took over all of his faculties, he pushed Taki backwards until he was pinned and the entire length of his body subdued beneath Klaus' weight.

'Klaus –'

With a practiced move, he parted Taki's legs and pressed himself between them, willing the intervening fabric to just dissolve. He forced his mouth open further, tongue probing deeper. Klaus surfaced briefly to fling his own shirt off and onto the floor. He palmed Taki's neck and relished the sound of his heavy breathing and the first subdued moan. He imagined how it would feel to fuck him again, the first time since that terrible incident in his shed, imagining the impossibly tight heat give way, reminding Taki who owned him –

Faster than a whip, a hand shot out of the blue light and cut a line of red across his cheek. He broke away abruptly and looked down. Taki's head was pressed back into the bedspread, narrowed eyes watching him almost questioningly. Both his hands were safely in the grip of Klaus' own. The hand that drew blood had shot out of his memory.

He had promised. Amid the broken mess of his room in the shed, right as he picked up the little schoolbook that was to save his life, Taki heard him swear it. That he would never touch Taki again.

Klaus' large silhouette crested across the bedroom window as he lifted himself up. Taki was taken aback, suddenly unsure of what to do with the space between them. Klaus hovered above him and chuckled.

'Second time,' he said. 'I keep forgetting. But at least I remember that I forget. That's an improvement, right?'

He sat up fully and slid to the bottom of the bed, trying to ignore the indignation of his fully erect penis. From his pants pocket he withdrew a cigarette and lit it. Taki, still breathing heavily, sat up against the headboard. Klaus revelled in his gaze, which was piercing even in the dim light. He wondered how much of the torture to which he subjected Taki stemmed from his childish desire to be the sole object of the Commander's imperial focus.

'Are you okay?' Taki asked falteringly, glancing at the numerous scars layering Klaus' torso.

Klaus took a deep drag.

'I'm fine. I'll just curl up at the foot of your bed like a good dog. For once.'

Taki made a small noise of annoyance. 'Don't be ridiculous.'

'Relax, I meant I'll go to my room. Just let me finish this cigarette.'

'I –'

Taki looked away. He was grateful for the darkness which hid the heat that rose to his face.

'That's not what I meant.'

The tip of Klaus' cigarette glowed orange for several seconds. He stared incredulously.

And yet Taki couldn't bring himself to say anything more.

Klaus chose his next words with care.

'Are you saying yes?'

On cue, ringing and chanting echoed from the land where Taki's forebears were buried. Lands lost and sullied, promises made and broken. Duties. One duty. Just one. The one to his people.

There was Klaus, waiting on the other side of the bed for an answer to a simple question. He would let him down again. How many times could he expect Klaus to bear it?

He dropped his gaze.

Though he had barely taken three drags on his cigarette, Klaus deftly stubbed it against his boot heel and threw it onto the floor. In the next breath, he had reached for Taki and pulled him across the mattress.

'For future reference,' he murmured into Taki's neck. 'That counts as a "yes".'

Taki wondered whether it was possible he felt relief. Then he no longer had time for lofty thoughts; Klaus had reached a large hand into his trousers and gripped his cock. A cry escaped his throat.

'Is this why?' Klaus said in a low growl. 'You wanted me to stay because you were already _this_ hard at the thought of what I was about to do to you?'

His hand slid up and down the length of Taki's penis as Taki moaned and whimpered into his shoulder. With his other hand he pushed Taki back onto the bed, hard, and held both his wrists down above his head in a position that had quickly become his favourite. Slowly, he slid a wet finger down to Taki's hole and probed.

A flicker of pain crossed Taki's face.

'Please. Not –'

He wanted to say _Not yet_. But the implications were too strong.

'Not there. I haven't –'

_Recovered._

Klaus winced at the memory.

It had been a few weeks since that horrible day. And still, each time he remembered what he had done to Taki - each time he remembered Taki's strangled voice begging him to stop, the way blood had dripped from his arm, the look in his eye before he passed out - he was overcome with a self-loathing so strong he could barely stand it. The cane woulds he had been dealt by Hasebe's hand didn't seem like adequate punishment. Nor did being washed up on a riverbank close to death after his mission in No Man's Land.

Beneath him, Taki waited tensely, his breathing slightly laboured. Klaus removed his hand and kissed him again.

When he drew back, the look in his eye made Taki's stomach lurch.

'Just because I can't do _that_ doesn't mean I can't make you feel good.'

He straightened, pulled Taki's pants off completely and took his cock into his mouth in one move.

Over the next few minutes, Taki was lost in mounting pleasure. Klaus worked his mouth and hands in a steady, devious rhythm, every now and then sending one hand over Taki's taught abdomen to tightly squeeze his nipples. Taki watched Klaus' thick head of hair rise and fall, he saw the sporadic flash of golden eyes and even a devilish grin, which was quite a feat given the circumstances.

'I'm… Klaus, it's…'

And with that sputtered warning, Taki came hard into Klaus' mouth. Klaus stayed put and swallowed every drop. Taki watched as if through a haze. Eventually, Klaus raised his head and body and wiped his mouth with relish.

There it was again.

The stirrings of something alien.

Taki expected to be repulsed. Instead –

He found his eyes roving from the muscles of Klaus' stomach up his chest to his wide shoulders. He wanted, suddenly, to feel it out for himself. He wanted to let his hands delicately follow the path his eyes had traced over Klaus' huge body. But before he could work up the nerve, Klaus bent down to catch his lips in a kiss.

And a new, dangerous thought took shape out of the fog. One that was far more bold but, somehow, far less intimate. Slowly, through the power of suggestion more than physical force, Klaus ended up lying back and Taki knelt over him, eyes betraying nothing. 

Klaus was afraid to say anything that would break the spell. Aware that he was gaping like a fool, he closed his mouth and tried to lay still.

Taki, for his part, felt like he was about to tread on No Man's Land with all of his countrymen watching. Though his mind was still lost in the whirling aftermath of his climax, he was still able to focus on Klaus. On giving Klaus what Klaus had just given him, if it was in his power. It was merely a... transaction, he told himself with a guilty flush.

He also tried telling himself that he had, after all, done it before, though he almost immediately regretted summoning the awful memory of being forced to gag on Klaus' penis in the shower.

He took a deep breath. He took his time. He considered, he touched and probed and stroked. And, with his eyes shut, he closed his mouth over Klaus' dripping head.

Klaus let out an absurdly deep moan. He fought the nearly overwhelming urge to ram his entire length into Taki's throat.

'Fuck, yes. Taki…'

Taki slowly worked his way down Klaus' cock and then pulled up again, flushed and self-conscious but encouraged by the sounds he was eliciting from Klaus. He realised in a strange rush that this was true power. He alone controlled the waves of Klaus' pleasure. Klaus' very being, in that moment, was in his hands. The tall, intimidating, golden presence of Captain Wolfstadt was reduced to this urgent, needy thing beneath him. Taki felt himself hardening again at the thought. He took him deeper and faster, opening his throat and fighting his gag reflex.

'Shit. Yes, take it all the way.'

Tears sprang to Taki's eyes from the effort. The whole room filled with the sound of suction. Taki noted with a surreal, illicit thrill that Klaus was no longer capable of words. He grunted and moaned, his cock hardening even more.

'You'd better pull off,' Klaus managed breathlessly. 'I'm close. Oh, fuck.'

Taki fixed him with a look that sent him over the edge.

He had every intent of swallowing, just as Klaus had done, but the first hot jet that hit his tongue surprised him and he pulled off too soon. Another blast hit him on the cheek just beneath his eye. The rest dribbled down Klaus' cock.

As Taki lifted his head, Klaus held his face and wiped the semen off his cheek with a thumb. Again almost without thinking, Taki turned his head slightly and licked his thumb clean.

Klaus was still struggling to form words. When Taki looked at him properly, he felt the spell break into small, sharp little shards. His face reddened as though the night only just caught up with him. He looked defeated.

Klaus laughed. He couldn't help it.

* * *

Despite how warm the previous night had been, Taki awoke in Klaus' ridiculous embrace. He was pressed against the soft yellow down of his chest and felt the light grip of Klaus' huge hands in his hair.

He pulled back almost immediately. Klaus smiled in his sleep. Taki regarded him coldly for a few moments. Everything about him was foreign. The wisps of blond splayed on the pillow. The heavy, self-assured jaw. Even his tanned skin against the crisp white bedsheets seemed somehow oversaturated. Implausible. He stared at Klaus' cheek where he had once struck him so hard it drew blood. He reached. His hand hovered. With a quick inhale, he pulled it back and left the bed.

He was halfway dressed before Klaus awoke.

'Morning,' said Klaus, voice full of sleep.

'We're late,' Taki replied without turning. 'I'm supposed to brief Uemura in five minutes.'

Klaus groaned. 'Let Hasebe take care of it.'

'We have to be there.'

'I was hoping for a repeat of last night.'

Taki felt his ironic, deadpan gaze on the back of his neck. He fought an irrational pang of humiliation.

'Get dressed.'

* * *

One klick outside of their compound, two hundred members of a Brass special ops force skulked in the treeline. They were as inconspicuous as shadows, ignored even by the kittering squirrels. They were poised, awaiting a one-word command which would take down the headquarters of the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone and welcome to _Maiden Rose: The Final Chapters!_
> 
> I'm writing this author's note several months after having finished the full story. I just wanted to give new readers a proper welcome (welcome!) and to give you an idea of where my story starts.
> 
> Chronologically, we last left Klaus and Taki in the manga when they had their tender, powerful moment against the curtain. Then they walked together, hands held, to deal with Katsuragi head-on.
> 
> My story skips all the impending drama with Katsuragi as well as the Duchess and Berkut. Though I have theories, I didn't want to delve into it too much because I'm excited to see exactly what Inariya-sama has planned with this story arc. (If she ever gets around to it *sob. Quick sidenote: there were rumours about her starting up again at the end of 2017 but sadly these were, in fact, just rumours.)
> 
> So the paragraph with the asterisk above was my vague and reductive way of summarising the Katsuragi/Duchess/Berkut drama still to come. I've only included a small hint about my suspicion that Katsuragi is about to blow Klaus' lies wide open - especially the lies he told Taki in order to shadow him and become his knight.
> 
>  _The Final Chapters_ takes place after all that has already happened and all has been forgiven (almost definitely wishful thinking there, haha). In fact, because the last (chronological) scenes in the manga saw Klaus and Taki more united than ever before, I've tried to capture some of that development - that's why they seem closer and slightly more open with each other in the chapter above. All they want now is to win the war so they can finally find some peace.
> 
> And that's where this story starts!
> 
> I know that the word count reads at over 400K but I hope that doesn't put you off! I love welcoming new readers on board :) If you get the chance to say hi at the bottom of a chapter, please do, it really makes my day! The response I've had for this story makes me so emotional every time I think about it. My readers/commenters are some of my favourite people in the world and I've made some wonderful friends while writing, so I'm grateful to this story in more ways than one <3
> 
>  _The Final Chapters_ is my tribute to the beautiful men that Inariya-sama created out of thin air and touched so many of our lives. Hope you enjoy the ride, everyone! Xx


	3. Almost as Tall as Klaus

A discerning eye could pick out their leader. It wasn't the man with the radio, nor the one standing with his weapon drawn and cocked by the furthest tree, nor the black statue with binoculars. He was further back. He crouched low, one knee on the ground, an idle finger twisting rhythmically around a long weed. All two hundred wore dark special ops suits and helmets that gave them a singular identity. And yet from the one who crouched and twisted, there exuded an aura of effortless poise that distinguished him. In fact, one could sense that those nearby were angled towards him, eyes and ears tuned.

'Status?' came a quiet, near imperceptible voice through the radio.

After a quick glance at his commanding officer, who nodded, the one with the radio whispered, 'We are go.'

'Go,' the radio instructed.

The weed was deftly uprooted. Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde stood to his full height.

'You heard it, boys.'

At first they moved quickly and quietly; four hundred feet making just enough of an impact to create a slight tremor in the ground. The trees thinned out gradually. In under five minutes, they were able to see the perimeter of the compound.

A well-aimed grenade launcher took out first one look out, then a second, a third, and then the main gate was all but decimated. In the tumult that followed, the two hundred breached the tree line and ceased to be shadows. They thundered through the main gate, weapons hot.

* * *

In the heart of the compound, Taki paced uneasily. Uemura and Hasebe were poring over maps and telegrams, torn between triumph and uncertainty. Klaus leaned against a far wall, hands deep in his pockets and steadily losing his battle against boredom. As far as he was concerned, Taki and his fellow countrymen were all biologically incapable of taking anything easily, including good news.

The activity in the general meeting room was centred on a small, unlikely figure by the name of Izumi Shunsuke, a political and media liaison who had been summoned to brief them on the situation abroad. As Taki had suspected, the home front was heating up and affecting their military campaigns.

'I have a theory,' Izumi said hesitantly, clearly out of his depth surrounded by uniforms and rankings. 'It's based on our coverage of the western alliance nations. We have only so much access to information gained by spies, as you can imagine, so this is largely unsubstantiated as far as hard evidence -'

'Get to the point,' Hasebe snapped.

Izumi wavered and pushed his glasses up his nose. He had a lean, youthful face despite being in his late thirties and hands that were gangly and thin like the rest of his body. He was smaller even than Taki. Klaus wondered how he had ever made it in the cut-throat world of journalism.

Hasebe and the others had been accosting him with vaguely deprecating questions for around ten minutes while Taki had paced, seemingly in his own world, though Klaus suspected he had committed every word to memory.

'We previously thought they were financially burdened due to riots and such by the anti-war movement in their own nations,' said Izumi, fishing out some headlines from his briefcase. 'But we now have reason to believe they're feeling the pressure of image even more than that of finance.'

'Image?' said Taki suddenly.

Izumi glanced up as if startled and found himself locked in Taki's gaze. He turned a damning shade of red. Klaus pricked up his ears for the first time.

'Y-yes. Commander.' Izumi averted his eyes and spoke to the table, ears still flaming. 'Every photograph and report out of the front lines is fuelling the anti-war movement in their nations. The Western Alliance is believed by a huge majority of their own people to be the antagonisers and instigators of this war. At first their governments tried to ban war correspondents from certain zones. The ban was later expanded to all zones. This censorship proved even more unpopular, caused more riots. As such, they've allowed journalists some coverage, and they are trying hard to clean up their image to prevent further rebellion, including withdrawing or surrendering where the casualty count otherwise would have been... unpalatable. The whole thing has become far more of a problem than they could ever have predicted.'

'It's new to them,' Taki said quietly. 'Having to deal with frivolous questions of reputation. They believed they had evolved and that it was only an issue for nations with archaic customs like our own. It must have been quite a shock for them, discovering the importance of things like honour and image.'

Izumi glanced up at Taki with something like wonder in his face.

'Yes, exactly. In fact, I have here a political dissertation written by a colleague which precisely supports -'

Klaus didn't catch Hasebe's frustrated interruption. He was busy watching Izumi's reaction to Taki's every word and move. The man was smitten. It took only a moment for Klaus to see them together in various states of undress, Taki cool and unruffled, Izumi flustered and worshipful. How bizarre, he thought, for Taki to be the alpha. It almost suited him.

He peeled himself away from this image and let Taki's words settle. Piercing insight into a complex political situation? Or thinly veiled metaphor for their relationship?

A deafening crack of thunder shook the floor and walls. They barely had time to recover from the shock before there was a second and a third. Klaus was immediately at Taki's elbow, gun drawn and eyes on the window. The officers ran into the hallway, shouting commands to any subordinate within earshot. A whistling sound began in the distance and Klaus flung Taki to the floor as all three windows were blasted inwards.

* * *

For the first few crucial minutes of a raid into a military compound, it is identical to a raid in any civilian territory. Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde had needed several weeks to convince his superiors of this. Yes, there are indeed soldiers and weapons and tanks. But for the first few minutes, very few of them will be in the same place at the same time. And what are soldiers separated from their weapons and tanks but well-trained, impotent civilians?

Hans grimaced as he skirted the first building where a surprised band of cadets had turned white and fled. Boys. He was up against boys. One of his men raised his gun.

'Hold your fire!' Hans bellowed.

They swarmed past the building and training ground, black as ants. Behind them smouldered the ruins of several lookouts and the main gates. Hans estimated five or six dead, a dozen wounded.

'Come on,' he muttered under his breath. 'Fucking hurry up. Defend yourselves.'

And like music to his ears, there was the rumble of trucks and tanks, the sharp coordinated yells of military orders and approaching feet. Hundreds of them. Real uniforms.

'Fire at will!'

He tried to keep track of the number of fallen, both on his end and theirs, but lost count quickly. Four, five bullets glanced off his helmet as he ducked from building to tree to truck, taking out as many as he dared.

They made their way, the ones who were left, through this first line of defence. Here was where the tide would change. Hans braced himself.

'Hold your fire!'

He saw a few of his own men turn to him in confusion. Here?

A second, more organised defence scouted them from rooftops and from behind windows. They ducked and weaved, their weapons suddenly mute. Ten more of his men fell. Hans ploughed on. He could see the central compound up ahead. Several of his men were already through.

'Sir?'

' _Hold your fire!_ '

Hans rolled behind a tree to avoid a barrage of bullets. From there, he fired a series of benign warning shots to scatter enemy soldiers and then plunged back on his course towards the central building, firing only at wheels of trucks or tank periscopes.

Their real objective was known only to two others besides Hans; his second and third in command, who were currently flanking him and issuing similar orders of restraint. The rest of the men were confused and anxious. He wondered how many of them were considering split-second mutiny. Perhaps they considered his actions mutinous to begin with. Perhaps they were reconsidering the concept of mutiny. Perhaps they finally understood the nihilistic underpinnings of both war and life.

He was thrown to the ground by a blast less than five metres to his left. The world dropped out in a high-pitched, white haze and struggled to filter back through his senses. He waited for the slice of the bullet that would take his life.

He wondered idly if Taki Reizen would find him before then.

* * *

Nearby, there was a silent but fierce conflict of interest. Taki needed to be on the front lines commanding his men and Klaus wanted to throw Taki to the ground and hold him there until the danger passed. They somehow managed to reach a wordless compromise. Klaus moved swiftly in front of him, trying not to impede Taki's progress through the building while several times flattening him against a wall or swiping his gun-wielding arm before Taki in an arc to take out an unfriendly that appeared suddenly in the hallway or outside a window. Taki saved Klaus' life twice, once by shouting in his ear to look out and another time by killing one of the ants in Klaus' blind spot.

There was something different about this, Klaus realised immediately. Something a lot uglier than when Taki was in the metal hull of Murakumo and he was roaring beside them on his bike. He felt a growing rage every time he saw one of those black barrels pointing at Taki. He was far too close to death.

Still, he had to give the Alliance kudos for a bold move like this. His rage melded with a strange reverence. This was his style all over.

'These guys must have balls of brass to pull something like this,' he shouted over the noise. Taki's back was pressed against his as they emerged from the main entrance.

'We need to alert the fourteenth and sixteenth divisions,' Taki yelled back, most likely having missed Klaus' clever pun. 'A surprise offensive like this in broad daylight. There must be an entire brigade.'

'I'll be surprised if they didn't bring their whole damn army.'

At the bottom of the sweeping stone steps leading into the building, they were met by an unexpected sight.

Around twenty enemy soldiers dressed in black, visors glinting in the midday sun, were kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their heads. Around them in a huge circle were countless guns pointed inwards. Just as soon as it had begun, the raid was over.

'What -?' Taki began.

'They surrendered, sir,' said a nearby lieutenant breathlessly. 'They just dropped to the ground a second ago.'

The air was tense and still, save for the odd shout or pat-pat of gunfire in the distance.

'What's happening out there?' asked Taki.

'I have word that we have it under control, sir. They're all surrendering. Brass special ops, we think.'

'How many are there?'

'I heard Azusa say up to two hundred.'

'Two... two hundred? Only?'

The kneeling figures before them were silent and impassive.

Klaus scoffed. He lowered his gun but didn't holster it. 'Brass balls indeed. Idiots.'

Taki cast an anxious gaze at the compound perimeter before stepping forward.

'Who is the ranking officer here?' he yelled across at the black figures. Klaus was surprised to hear how fluent Taki still was in Klaus' mother tongue.

* * *

Hans Regenwade lay on his side, his body still numb. Over the past few seconds, he had seen dark figures drop to the ground, turning back into shadows. His men. Surrendering. Finally. And there, through the thick, grey blanket that surrounded him and dulled his senses, Hans made out a figure. He was small but imposing. Black hair, flapping coat. He was saying something. The sound waves approached him teasingly, with odd dilations in tempo and volume.

'...officer here? ...me? I asked who... charge?'

With immense effort, Hans lifted himself onto an elbow. He blinked and lifted his visor. Taki Reizen was walking through his brigade, peering at each soldier in turn.

Suddenly a hand lifted him to a sitting position. He turned slowly, feeling blood trickling out of his ear. It was Alric Liedermann, his second in command. He was kneeling too and watching Hans in concern.

'Did... did it work?' Hans spluttered.

'Yes,' Alric whispered. 'Minimal casualties, from what I saw. We're here. Can you stand? Reizen's asking to speak to the ranking officer.'

'Reizen,' Hans murmured dumbly to himself.

He raised his hand.

Taki's head jolted back. He strode quickly towards the two soldiers. One was kneeling and supporting the half-collapsed weight of another.

'I am... Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde, commanding officer,' the latter said with difficulty, maintaining steady eye contact with Taki. 'I surrender and ask that my men be taken as political prisoners in accordance with the Convention of -'

'How many more are out there?' Taki demanded coldly.

After a beat, the other man spoke up. 'Out where?'

'Beyond the compound. This is only the first offensive, isn't it?'

'No,' he replied.

'What?'

'We're it,' the stooped man insisted drily.

Taki eyed him, the one named Hans, with a flash of both suspicion and familiarity. The brazen, cavalier comment reminded him quite strongly of someone else. And yet, in this man's clear grey eyes, there wasn't an ounce of the smugness or arrogance that usually accompanied Klaus' wisecracks. His words were ironic but serious. Almost melancholy.

'If you cooperate now,' Taki said at length. 'I will spare your men.'

Hans stared back, expressionless.

'You would have spared them regardless, Commander Reizen,' he said quietly. The dullness around him had begun to recede while the pain on the left side of his skull was becoming more pronounced. He saw Taki's face clearly through the fog and the eyes that glinted at his last remark.

'How dare -'

'I appreciate you trying to play the Kaiser,' he said, bracing against Alric's shoulder to rise to a kneeling position. 'But I know how you work. And how you lead.' He gingerly lifted a hand to his bleeding ear. 'How you think.'

Taki wasted only a second longer staring down at the dazed soldier who was clearly half out of his wits. He turned to a nearby lieutenant.

'Order a full perimeter sweep for a radius of two clicks. Alert the other divisions. Take the prisoners to the holding -'

With a last burst of strength, Hans reached out and grabbed a fistful of Taki's coat front. Taki let out a sound of shock as Hans pulled him down to his level. Hans marvelled at how light Taki was, how easily he yielded. How did he command so much power? And love?

In the few seconds it took for Taki's men to react, Hans leaned in close to the boy's ear. His head was suddenly filled with a peculiar scent.

'I must speak with you alone. It's not what you think.'

A heavy log collided with the left side of his face and sent him reeling. He hit the ground hard and blinked through the small yellow lights bursting across his vision. Guns cocked near his head in every direction and he lifted his arms. A solid kick in his gut made him crumple inwards.

'Klaus, leave it!'

Taki forcibly lowered Klaus' gun, aware of the very real danger of Hans Regenwalde's brain being splattered over the grass. He told the other soldiers to stand down.

Klaus watched the squirming man on the ground before him. He tried to find retribution in the steady stream of painful grunts but all he could see was Taki's hair flying back as he was yanked to the ground and the black grip on his coat.

'Who the _fuck_ is this asshole?'

It took Hans several seconds to realise that the log that had collided with his head was actually the towering blond man's knee. He opened his jaw wide, trying to jolt it back into place. He tilted his head upwards slightly.

Klaus von Wolfstadt and Taki Reizen. Barely concealed rage and icy reserve. There they were. Out of nowhere, a small smile crossed his face.

Klaus bristled.

'Looks like there's a joke we've missed, Taki,' he said, cocking his gun.

Hans coughed. 'No joke. I never liked jokes, remember?'

The voice, which Klaus had been too far away to hear until then, was suddenly very familiar. It conjured a startling series of images. High school, dusty football fields, ringing bicycle bells.

Taki felt Klaus stiffen beside him.

Hans coughed again.

The gun fell to Klaus' side as he tried to focus. The expressionless grey eyes were the same, as were the high cheekbones and roman nose. In fact, not much had changed in ten years.

'Hans,' he said finally, though he didn't want to believe it.

'Klaus.'

The smile was gone. Again, there was no humour in his tone.

* * *

Half an hour later, Taki, Klaus, Hasebe and Suguri stood before the bars of Hans Regenwalde's private cell. Two soldiers stood guard nearby despite the fact that Hans had been disarmed, searched, stripped and re-clothed. He stood beneath his cell's narrow barred window. He was tall, almost as tall as Klaus, with wide shoulders and a strong, lean form that recalled the agility of large cats. Without his helmet, a heavy fringe of russet hair fell over his forehead. The left side of his face was concealed under a thick bandage.

'Mild shell shock,' Suguri had informed them earlier as they walked to his cell. 'And then blunt trauma,' he added in Klaus' direction.

'He's lucky he's getting treatment and not an autospy,' Klaus had replied. He had recovered considerably since first learning of Hans' identity and had settled back into despising him for what had happened.

Regardless, he managed to remain silently in the background while Hans slowly and meticulously relayed his story.

'I wish to defect,' he concluded, gazing calmly at his hostile audience. 'I no longer believe in my government's objectives nor methods in this war. I want to join your side in the fight.'

A stunned silence followed.

'So, all of today's deaths,' Taki began in a low, dangerous tone, 'all twenty-three of my men, and one hundred and twenty of yours, were in the name of your defection?'

Hans lowered his gaze, showing a hint of emotion for the first time.

'I regret every one of them. I tried to contain the number of casualties. But some loss was necessary. The raid had to look authentic.'

'Authentic to your government?'

'Yes. They will now believe that the raid simply failed and won't suspect anything beyond that. They can't know about my agenda.'

'Your agenda?'

'To remain here. And help you defeat them.'

'Bullshit,' Hasebe observed.

'I think that's the first time I've ever agreed with you,' Klaus finally piped up.

Hans turned to him.

'I would have thought you, of all people, would understand.'

Klaus drew level with Hasebe, his jaw set. Taki braced inwardly.

'Don't even try that. I'm nothing like you. I didn't barrel my way over to this side just because I had a few political scruples with my government.'

Taki sensed that Klaus had been backed into a corner without even realising it.

'Then,' said Hans, 'why _are_ you here?'

'I -'

The spotlight had shifted quite perceptibly. Taki felt a flush creep on his cheeks. Suguri kept his gaze trained on the floor.

'That's not a bad question,' Hasebe muttered under his breath, looking sideways at Klaus. 'By the way, Wolfstadt, exactly what is your history with him?'

'We're old school mates,' Hans answered for him with something close to a smile.

Taki looked up in surprise. 'At Luckenwalde?'

'Before then,' said Klaus. 'High school.'

'Klaus was something of a role model in our day,' said Hans. 'I looked up to him. All the boys did.'

It was a clever move. Hans had effortlessly sided himself with Klaus, meaning they would either sink or swim together. Taki recognised the tactic.

'So you two were close then?' Hasebe said derisively.

'I wouldn't say that,' Klaus said through gritted teeth.

Taki wondered if he was imagining the overly defensive note that had crept into Klaus' voice. An odd, disagreeable feeling pricked him.

'Why would your government authorise such a suicidal mission?' Suguri asked.

'I've led my team on similar missions, always successfully. Of course we never tackled an entire division single-handed before. But we fed the minister of war false intelligence claiming that over half of your division would be out on sorties today, which evened the odds. They eventually consented.'

'We?' said Hasebe. 'Who are you working with?'

'There are two others on this mission, I've already told you. Lieutenant Alric Liedermann and Colonel Gunter Straffberg.'

'No, who is working with you in your government? The ones who are powerful enough to feed your ministers false intelligence.'

Hans hesitated.

'I can't tell you that yet. Not until I have your trust and your protection.'

Hasebe made a noise of incredulity.

'Make no mistake,' Hans said, his voice hardening. 'This is conspiracy and treason on every conceivable level. We have a wide network of people in very high places quietly working to depose the current leaders of the Western Alliance. I'm only one of them. And this is my mission. I will do whatever it takes to win your trust. If you believe me, we can end this war soon and with minimal loss.'

There was a small pause.

'Why here?' said Taki. 'Why the Fifteenth Armoured Division?'

'I've followed your campaigns over the years. They've always been impressive. I believe you're in the perfect strategic location to make a difference. I - You've -'

He was suddenly struggling to find words. Klaus narrowed his eyes.

'It would be an honour to serve you.'

'Surely you don't believe it?' Hasebe implored Taki. 'Every word is a lie. It's the most transparent attempt at subterfuge I've seen since... since Wolfstadt!'

Klaus sighed. 'If you ask me -'

'No one asked you,' Hasebe snarled.

'I think Taki's had enough wayward foreigners throwing themselves at his feet.'

Hasebe faltered. It was an uncomfortable feeling for him and the Mad Dog to be on the same side.

Taki regarded Hans coolly for a few moments. Then he turned and left the holding cell. Klaus followed.

* * *

On their way to Taki's room, they passed by several people, two of whom were rather struck by their passing. The first was Izumi Shunsuke, who nearly dropped his briefcase when Taki nodded absently at him. He'd fled from the bombardment earlier under the protection of soldiers and was then handed over to a cadet for what was essentially glorified babysitting. The cadet, who was now escorting Izumi to his room, was Haruki Yamamoto. As Klaus passed, he recognised Haruki and tousled his hair, much to the boy's sheepish delight.

'Still got my gun?' Klaus asked over his shoulder.

'Yes, sir.'

'Good.'

Izumi and Haruki watched the pair round the corner.


	4. You're on the Ground

'You're being quiet about all this,' Klaus noted.

Taki unbuttoned his cuffs.

'Enough has been said today.'

'That's for sure.'

Klaus glanced at the scotch on the dresser nearby, itching for a glass. But Taki's tone hinted at the need for solitude.

He longed for the simpler days before his foolhardy promise of sexual abstinence when all he needed for inspiration was a glance at the devil's peak at the nape of Taki's neck, a place whose taste and texture he knew well, and he could push him against any surface, horizontal or vertical, and reveal the pale flesh beneath his uniform to eyes and fingertips alike.

Alas.

He was about to take his leave when Taki asked quietly, 'How well did you know Regenwalde?'

Loping gait. A school uniform that seemed to hang too loose on his frame. Steely grey eyes that always hurriedly turned away. A slow, nervous smile.

'Well enough. We were in the same year. He was bright but quiet.'

_So Hasebe was right?_

'So you knew him enough to be friends?' Taki hoped he had succeeded in keeping his tone casual.

'We ran in the same circles a few times but I never had much to say to him. He never had much to say to anyone. Why?'

Taki felt his pulse pick up just a little. He felt ridiculous.

Klaus sighed.

'If you're asking whether I know him well enough to know whether he's lying, you can bet your life he is.'

Relieved, Taki slid off his belt and didn't reply.

'True, I didn't think he'd join the army, let alone become a Lieutenant General,' Klaus continued, turning to look out the window. 'He never seemed like the flag-waving type. But it doesn't mean he hates our country enough to defect. He's a snake in the grass. As if you'd need to pull a stunt like this just to become an informant.'

'Stranger things have happened.'

Klaus sensed danger. 'Please don't tell me you believe him.'

'I'm far from believing him. But you should remember how it feels to be mistrusted by everyone around you.'

Klaus fancied that he could see a thin wisp of cloud changing colours in the sunset. As he watched it, a response to Taki's remark formed in his mind, ready to fire, but he suddenly felt weary. He couldn't be expected to fight his sexual impulses and fight about politics at the same time. He was only human.

'I'll see you in the morning,' he said, turning to go.

Again, there was no reply. Wondering if he had heard, Klaus looked over his shoulder in time to see Taki's shirt slip off his back to the floor, leaving him standing in the half-light fully naked.

Aware now of the likelihood that he had in fact dreamed everything, including running into an old schoolmate during a raid, Klaus blinked and froze.

Without a word, Taki walked into the en suite. He left the door resting lightly against the frame.

Klaus was almost completely undressed in a few seconds.

In the en suite, steam was already rising from the shower and Taki had stepped inside. Simultaneously fuelled and restrained by the memory of their last scene in a bathroom, Klaus wasted no time lifting Taki up and pressing him against the wet tiled wall. They kissed for long moments. His weight was ideal, Klaus thought, feeling the pleasant tension in his muscles. Now he could hold him the way he'd wanted when they were under siege. Here, he would erase the memory of bullets ricocheting off walls not far from Taki's head.

Taki, for his part, felt weak again. When his feet were on the ground and Klaus was elsewhere, he managed to convince himself that his memories of their intimacy were somehow exaggerated; surely he had enough strength and dignity to prevent being thrown about like a weightless doll. And yet, it took only a few steps into the shower before his memories were vindicated. Here he was at another's mercy, cornered, defeated, his feet now struggling to maintain an ankle grip behind another's back for fear of slipping.

Klaus pushed him harder into the wall so only his hips supported Taki's weight. His hands were free to tilt Taki's face for better access to his mouth, to run through Taki's wet hair. Every touch was possessive. Taki had lost. He was the spoils of a battle he'd barely even fought.

A battle he'd barely even fought. Was this the same as losing on the battlefield? Or in hand-to hand combat? Did he ever before experience this surging in his chest, the breathlessness, the thrill of total abandonment, the bittersweet of surrender? Taki could recall but one sensation to rival Klaus – when he was four or five, standing on the banks of a white, coursing river that ran along the border of his family's property. He had stared for ages, minutes, and then almost without thinking, he'd turned, stretched out his arms and fallen backwards. His minders discovered him almost a kilometre downriver, soaked to the bone but altogether unharmed.

It's fucking ridiculous, Klaus meanwhile thought, to be so moved by another man's eyes. The water had flattened Taki's hair over his eyes where they glistened like polished rock. By then, Klaus was painfully hard and he nudged almost unconsciously against Taki's entrance.

_Not yet._

A sharp intake of breath stopped him.

Klaus groaned in frustration and was startled by the resounding echo in the bathroom. He laughed and stepped back a little, keeping his head close to Taki's. They were both breathing heavily.

'This is taking years from my life.'

Taki knew it was a joke. But the words twisted into an old tattered knot in his gut.

He remembered a great deal from that day when he had fallen willingly into the frothy embrace of the river; its deep, gurgling voice, the surprising jolts of salt water that occasionally rushed into his mouth and nose, the feeling of being both submerged and buoyed. He remembered the fleeting, childish epiphany that perhaps his family had lied to him. Perhaps there was no such thing as duty and code. Perhaps this was all there was. But more than any of it, more than the river itself, he remembered the looks on his minders' faces when they found him, the endless chastising, the scars on his honour, the promise that he would never do it again.

Klaus dropped to one knee and swallowed Taki's cock. Taki's haggard cry echoed, sounding pitiful in the wake of Klaus' visceral grunt. He hung his head, one hand bracing against the wall behind him, another in Klaus' hair. Presently, Klaus pulled back to spit liberally on his fingers. He glanced up with an unreadable expression.

'Tell me when it hurts.'

It sounded like it hurt him just to say it. Taki had never heard such a concession from him – he hadn't believed Klaus to be capable of any nuance beyond all in or all out.

His finger probed gently, gentler than he had ever been. The intrusion nevertheless sent a reflex jolt throughout Taki's body and his tongue curled around the word 'stop'. He bit it back, knowing that this time Klaus would listen. One word from him and everything would fall away and he would be left alone against a cold, wet wall. His hands gripped Klaus' hair which the water had turned dark. He felt Klaus go deeper and old scars protested. Taki moaned through his teeth. His body rocked slightly back and forth.

Klaus rested his forehead on Taki's abdomen and closed his eyes. He didn't care that his own cock was ignored and leaking steadily. He only felt the heat and tightness, heard the groans his hands were eliciting, felt the grip tightening on his hair. He waited for a word from Taki that would end it but it never came. He pressed his face and nose into Taki's skin just above his pubic hair, kissing, biting. He pushed even further.

Taki cried out and covered his own mouth with his hand. There. Klaus smirked and pressed.

'Ah! Klaus…'

Taki was again on the precipice of telling him to stop, not for pain this time but for its devilish counterpart. He realised in dismay that Klaus could tell the difference. Without removing his finger, and in fact while maintaining his assault on Taki's prostate, Klaus stood and kissed him, forcing him to moan into his mouth. Without thinking and almost without looking, Taki felt for Klaus' penis and gripped it hard. Klaus dropped his head onto Taki's shoulder.

They came almost at the same time.

* * *

'Can I stay?'

Taki didn't think his head incline was observable let alone interpretable. Yet he wasn't overly surprised when Klaus grinned and settled back against a pillow with a huff. Taki watched his still wet hair dampen the pillowcase. It was the second night in a row he had allowed it.

'Should we start tomorrow?' asked Klaus, eyes closed.

Taki tugged self-consciously at his loose nightshirt and slid between the sheets.

'Yes.'

Somewhere between the shower and the bed, the topic had turned back to Hans Regenwalde. Despite the glaring lack of information regarding the would-be defector, they had somehow devised a plan of action.

'We wouldn't have to resort to deception if the fucker is telling the truth,' Klaus said thickly, already succumbing to his climax-induced stupor.

'Even if he is telling the truth, he won't tell us certain things for a while until he feels he can trust us.' Taki stared into the distance, calculating. 'That's what he'll say anyway. It's our chance to get as much tactical advantage out of the situation as possible whether he's lying or not.'

'Mm,' said Klaus indecipherably.

Taki lay close to edge of the bed with his back to Klaus, a position which somehow felt a lot less safe than he had figured at first. Klaus opened one eye to look at him. Taki's uneasy, defensive figure reminded Klaus of his first day at the academy when he had retreated into a cocoon of bedsheets.

'You know,' Klaus murmured, sliding a hand behind his head. 'This is practically marriage. We had something that passes for sex and now we're having work-related pillow talk.'

Taki didn't know how to reply, but heat rose to his face in the darkness.

The curtain hadn't been drawn the whole way across the expansive bedroom window. A sliver of moonlight fell on the dresser, illuminating the scotch whose siren call Klaus had evaded earlier (only to submit to a far more alluring siren not long afterwards, he thought). He recalled from last night that it had been quality scotch.

In his last moments before sleep, an insignificant but obvious piece of the Reizen puzzle fell into place. Taki's code prohibited the consumption of alcohol. In fact, in all the time he'd known him, Klaus had only once seen Taki lift a glass to his lips - the day they had mourned the loss of a cadet in Luckenwalde. And yet there was always a bottle on that dresser, sometimes containing whisky, other times a mature wine or brandy. Drinks that had always been to Klaus' taste.

 _Which means_ , he thought before promptly falling asleep.

* * *

Hans Regenwalde was awake when they arrived the following morning, giving the appearance that he had remained thus, sitting poised and upright on the edge of his cot, for the entire night.

They spent upwards of two hours in front of his cell. Taki did most of the questioning. Uemura and Hasebe were nearby. A second lieutenant hunkered near the doorway, out of Hans' sight, examining a large, creased map that was spread over his lap and listening through speakers to a transceiver.

Their plan worked beautifully. Under the guise of basic interrogation, Taki had Hans speaking continuously. Though everyone in the cell was aware that each word was carefully weighed beforehand, Taki and Klaus hoped Hans would be guarding himself against the wrong thing. Misdirection. It had been Klaus' plan originally, honed and revised by Taki.

'Whether he's lying about his allegiance or not,' Taki stated bluntly to Uemura and Hasebe on their way to the cell. 'There must be another Brass special ops team nearby, if only to gather intelligence about yesterday's raid. I'm going to get Regenwalde to tell us where they are.'

Hans steadily outlined his military past, his missions, accomplishments, promotions, political inclinations. He only hesitated when names were demanded. Taki feigned mild frustration when he hit these walls and artfully dived back into questions about Western Alliance special ops tactics as if they were a consolation prize. Hans seemed happy to divulge.

A small hand gesture from Taki would make the second lieutenant twist the dial, murmur orders.

Klaus watched him work with new reverence. It seemed there was nothing the young prince wasn't capable of.

Towards the end of the second hour, Klaus, whose grasp of military strategy wasn't as advanced as his master's, nevertheless understood that a triangulation of sorts had taken place. The second lieutenant had hinted from the shadows, with mouthed words and gestures, that he needed one more piece of information to make the call.

Taki, however, appeared to have exhausted his diagonal questioning skills. Perhaps this needed a less delicate touch.

Klaus waited for the perfect moment to interrupt Hans' steady dialogue. Then he laughed once, short and loud.

'Sounds like you slept through advanced raid tactics,' he intoned. 'Everyone knows you need a reliable vantage point. Told you he was full of shit, Taki.'

Hans' gaze was both calm and piercing. _Not unlike someone else I know_ , a thought barrelled into Klaus' mind out of nowhere.

'A vantage point does not necessarily imply from ground level,' Hans replied with the air of a patient teacher correcting his wayward pupil. 'The team on the ground would only need a means of communicating with the team in the air. A combined…'

Taki didn't wait for him to finish. The second lieutenant gave a swift nod of confirmation and Taki was out the door with Uemura and Hasebe hot on his heels.

For the first time, Hans seemed surprised. He stared after Taki and then glanced uneasily at Klaus who had sacrificed a few seconds away from Taki to reap the satisfaction of that expression.

'Still smart, Hans,' he stated. 'But not smart enough. You're in Reizen territory now.'

 _A FEW MOMENTS AGO, WHILE HANS WAS TALKING  
_ The second lieutenant had sent out a transmission requesting information about any air activity, both enemy and friendly, that had flown near the fifteenth armoured division compound that morning. Most were reports of their own airforce on routine patrols. But there was one report about a single civilian aircraft, technically a friendly, that had unexpectedly flown off course before correcting itself. Rookie error, they'd thought.

 _A vantage point from the sky_ , Hans had inadvertently told them.

They'd intercepted this plane's single innocuous transmission and decoded it. It was the third point of the triangulation. There was indeed another special ops team, four clicks out, several hundred strong. All this had been gathered in under a minute and a half since Hans' slip of the tongue.

Taki and his crew gunned Murakumo to life and Klaus blazed a trail before them.

Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde sat back down, host to a strange mix of feelings.

* * *

The black ants were good but, with the element of surprise, Taki's offensive was better. Klaus' rifle and grenades blew holes in their formations and sent them scattering right into the path of the tanks.

The trees were unfortunate casualties. Taki and Klaus had never engaged in open combat in such a thickly wooded area before. Klaus felt small tugs of guilt every time a grand chestnut was blasted to its roots to clear the way for tanks or branches snapped in the aftermath of grenade explosions and hung in sad drapes. The foliage was small, cheerful and green, quite different to the swaying clumps of wisteria that featured so often in his dreams, but their suffering hurt him regardless. Inside his tank, Taki was struggling with the same thought.

Just as the final few enemy soldiers fled in retreat, a huge blast shook the ground behind the first line of tanks. Taki instinctively issued orders for half the tanks to continue their offensive before swinging Murakumo's trunk around to face these new attackers.

It didn't take long to figure out that the attackers weren't behind but above.

'It's an air strike!' Klaus yelled through the radio somewhat unnecessarily. 'At least a dozen. Go! _Go!_ '

The planes roared above them like wasps, tailing their retreat. As they rumbled back to the compound, fearing a blast that would break them apart, Taki tried to get in touch with headquarters to ask whether they were mounting an air defence. Yes, he gathered, but with such little notice they'd be outnumbered for some time. Taki gritted his teeth.

'Klaus?'

'I'm here.'

'I –'

Taki hesitated. He suddenly realised he hadn't called for Klaus with an order in mind, or, for that matter, for any kind of useful purpose at all. Klaus' uncanny psychic abilities seemed to carry on the radio waves. He chuckled.

'Just calling to say hello?'

'Watch for the special ops soldiers,' Taki said, furious with himself. 'Don't lose your focus on the ground.'

'You're on the ground. No chance of my losing focus.'

And yet with every new detonation, Taki's heart leapt to his mouth. Every spattering of gunfire was a tan coat drenched in blood. Every blast was an upturned motorbike, a man lying on his back, face turned away, surrounded by Taki's countrymen who were afraid to touch him. Taki shook off the memory as Murakumo rolled past the main gates of the compound.

The planes turned in the sky and left.

* * *

'I know where they're going,' Hans said.

Given the events of that morning, Taki had been sure that Hans would finally confess he was no defector. After all, a combined air and land raid had been launched a mere twenty-four hours after Hans' raid. To top it off, Hans' own interrogation had led to the discovery, and forestalling, of this new strike.

Instead, without skipping a beat, Hans had impassively told Taki that his hunch about a combined land and air strike was simply that; a hunch. He'd had no knowledge of the strike and certainly didn't think the Alliance would follow up so soon with another raid.

Whatever the case, Taki felt himself fall neatly into the trap of wanting to know what Hans knew about the planes' destination.

'There's a good chance they're heading for a secret base near the Atlantian Sea. We have several bases near the shoreline that we've managed to keep hidden from you and the Euroteans.'

The room, containing the usual crowd plus several soldiers, held its breath. This would give them more information than their best spies had been able to deliver in months.

'Where?' Taki demanded.

It depended on a range of things. Maps would be needed. Taki would need to be specific about where they were spotted last, what bearing they were heading in, what kind of insignia the planes bore. Klaus smelt that it boiled down to the fact that several personnel, Taki included, would have to go into Hans' cell with equipment.

A snake slithering around the paws of a small black cat. Klaus' hackles rose. He tried to catch Taki's eye but Taki was ahead of him.

'Guards,' he commanded quietly.

The soldiers near him, four of them, raised their guns at once, all pointing in a fan towards Hans. Hans glanced at them and then back at Taki. Message received.

Klaus' hackles remained raised as Taki and Hans consulted the map and made calculations on opposite sides of a small table that had been placed in the middle of the cell. The soldiers stayed outside, guns held up without so much as a quiver. Even so, Klaus was uneasy. He hovered at Taki's side, remembering the way Hans' black grip had pulled Taki to the ground.

'Are you sure they were spotted there?'

'One of my colonels was certain he saw them.'

A memory suddenly surfaced. Once, in seventh grade, Hans had spent an entire lesson folding origami under his table. Klaus remembered watching him out of the corner of his eye for a long time. He'd found that look of intense concentration strangely hypnotic. When the teacher caught him, Hans was sent out of the room amid hearty sniggers. His dark hair, redder than it was now, didn't hide the welling tears. Klaus remembered feeling a juvenile twinge of guilt. As though he ought to have prevented his humiliation. Warned him somehow.

Now Hans stood calm and tall, a pillar of self-assurance in the midst of enemy territory. Everything and nothing had changed.

'So if we head them off before the border of No Man's land here,' said Taki intently, 'we could –'

'You can't. There will be lookouts here and…' Keeping one finger on the map, Hans moved swiftly around the table until he was behind Taki. His arm grazed Taki's as he pointed to a different region. 'Here.'

In one sudden stride, Klaus seized Hans roughly by his collar and thrust him backwards. Hans stumbled against the wall but regained his footing easily enough. His face registered mild surprise. The guards yelled a few warnings but were silenced by Taki's raised hand.

Klaus stood between them and stared Hans down; a tamer repeat of their meeting the previous day.

More memories. Beyond origami, outside the school, ringing bicycle bells, a dusty football field, glancing up from his game to see Hans being thrown off his bike by older students, being beaten. Kicked. Indignation flaring.

Had he always been a snake? Had Klaus simply missed that fact years ago?

'I didn't mean any harm,' Hans said carefully.

Taki stared, wondering how Klaus so effortlessly managed to escalate any situation he was in.

'Leave us, Klaus. You're overreacting.'

It took several heated seconds before Klaus moved out of the way. As Hans approached the table again, Taki squared his shoulders.

'I'll remind you,' he said curtly, 'of the guns pointed this way.'

'I assure you I didn't forget,' Hans replied.

A few minutes later, when everything was packed up and the cell door clanged shut, Hans once again watched Taki and Klaus leave the building together. He smiled gently, suspicions confirmed.

* * *

Klaus waited outside the main building for what felt like hours. Taki had told him to wait there with a tone that could have been directed at a disobedient retriever. He sulked. He angrily imagined Hans fucking Taki on all fours. He then angrily imagined fucking Taki on all fours while Taki choked on Hans' cock. He kicked a dry branch and it went skittering across the dirt.

Finally, towards evening, Taki and Uemura emerged followed by several soldiers Klaus hadn't seen before. They piled into four jeeps, three soldiers per vehicle, and drove out of the compound. Klaus sat up front beside the driver and Taki took the rear.

Klaus didn't muster the energy to ask where they were going. In any case, he couldn't be sure Taki would even have replied – his half-lidded gaze was trained out the window.

Eventually, after about an hour, Klaus sighed majestically and climbed over the front seat and sprawled in the back, his right leg pressing against Taki's left. The driver didn't glance back but Taki pulled away all the same.

'I get it,' Klaus announced. 'You had a big meeting where you all decided you'd drive me to the middle of nowhere and shoot me. Is that it?'

The landscape shifted outside. The trees were replaced by moors, wild and overgrown.

'I'm flattered you think you need twelve soldiers and three jeeps for the job.'

'If you are ever to interject in one of my meetings again like you did today,' Taki began icily, 'it will only be when my life is in immediate danger. Do you understand?'

Klaus felt a surge of anger.

'And what if your honour is in immediate danger? Should I just sit back and watch?'

Taki looked at him in disbelief. He met Klaus' searing gaze for several moments. _Of all the people to be talking about my honour –_

He took a deep, silent breath and calmed himself. There were more pressing matters. Klaus had yet to be briefed about the new mission.

'Listen.'

Despite everything, Taki felt a strange, simmering excitement when he imagined how Klaus might react.

He detailed his lengthy conversation with headquarters. Their new plan of action was to follow up on Hans' information about the Alliance's secret airbases near the sea. He outlined what Klaus would need to do. Klaus listened, his incredulity mounting. There was no way Taki could possibly have been clearer. And yet, surely it couldn't mean…

The airfield swam into view out of the gloom of dusk. Klaus' heart thudded audibly.

He still couldn't believe it even when Taki and Uemura led them around the hangar to where a row of Beaufighters waited in silence. Through a whirlwind of emotion, Klaus took in the twin-engine heavy fighter, her pointed nose, her sleeping propellers. He was already weightless, the wind, like a real thing, a live animal, was already whipping past his goggles, whistling urgently in his ears.

One of the soldiers – a pilot, Klaus realised – strode past him, buckling in his helmet. While Klaus had been busy gaping, the others had donned their gear.

'Taki…'

Klaus glanced down to see Taki holding out a pair of goggles to him. Klaus took them mutely.

'I assume you remember how to fly,' said Taki. He looked up with a small, dazzling smile that took Klaus' breath away. 'Lycanthrope.'


	5. A Plain-Worded Request

Klaus’ loud yellow laugh crackled through the airwaves over the dark waters of the bay. He had just flipped the Beaufighter upside down over another plane, flashing his colleague a grin and a jovial middle finger as he was suspended above him, before righting it and cutting a snake-like path towards the horizon.

They were merely dark specks on a darker sky, with only the occasional glint of moonlight betraying their incongruity in the air, but Taki could see Klaus’ elation as clearly as if it had been a wagging tail and lolling tongue. The man was born to fly.

 _Have you ever flown over the ocean at night?_ Klaus had asked him once, out of nowhere. The low rumble of his voice and the bleak, endless darkness it had projected even in the comfort of his room had sent a small shiver up Taki’s spine.

Uemura and the others were already heading for the jeeps but Taki stood on the tarmac until the glints, sporadic though they were, receded entirely.

Taki had followed Klaus to the plane and watched him vault inside like he was walking through his own front door. There had been an absurd moment beforehand, right after the hatch was opened, when Taki almost reached out to touch his shoulder. 

In hindsight, would it have been so strange? Taki wondered, eyes unblinking. It would have been nothing more than a commander seeing off his captain. No one would have read anything into one hand on one shoulder. Except Klaus, of course.

‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ Klaus had murmured, gazing at the Beaufighter’s propellers and running his hand over the fuselage where the kanji for _Arai_ had been painted. ‘This might be how you feel about Murakumo. Maybe.’

Taki had watched them take off, marvelled at their speed, their aerodynamic perfection, their improbable weightlessness. He’d watched them become specks. They’d cut off radio communication to the ground almost immediately for fear of being intercepted. But before they signed off, Taki heard Klaus’ professional, measured responses and the bubbling excitement he was containing. And then of course, he saw the showing off, the loops in the air. A child who couldn’t contain his Christmas morning glee. Taki felt his spirits lift, briefly. Then he remembered their mission and silently sent a plain-worded request to his ancestors to watch over the _Arai_.

* * *

Dawn was just breaking over the compound. Taki passed a few drills on his way across the grounds. The men saluted him as they marched. A few were red-faced, whether from the morning chill or from Taki’s presence he could not be sure.

Reverence so ardent that it bordered on embarrassing was something he’d been used to since he was a boy. It was simply a fixed part of his universe. Then Klaus and Luckenwalde had blown a large hole in that assumption. What made him any different? What gave him the right or the privilege to be elevated in any way above these men alongside whom he could bleed and die just as easily? Death paid no heed to family name or rank. More and more the whole thing was beginning to resemble an intricate, omnipresent farce.

Or was he only now trying to reassess his world because he’d allowed the rose of his family’s name, the rose of his family’s crest, heritage, legacy, power… to break?

His own cheeks reddened and he hoped the private who was with him didn’t notice. His inability to control his basic emotions (even when Klaus wasn’t around, he noticed with no small amount of irritation) factored into his decision to dismiss the soldier before going in to see Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde.

The prisoner and self-proclaimed defector was again sitting upright in bed, staring out the narrow barred window set high into the stone wall. He turned slowly as Taki approached.

‘I assume based on Captain Wolfstadt’s conspicuous absence from your shadow that he is somewhere over the bay heading towards the secret Alliance air base?’

It’s unnerving and specific, Taki thought not for the first time, how Hans was able to deliver such dry, humorous words with no humour at all. He kept that thought to himself, along with the knowledge that Klaus would already have reached the base by now.

‘I would recommend that you suspend all radio communication with the air,’ Hans continued. ‘The Alliance interceptors are more advanced than yours.’

‘We’ve thought of that.’

‘Good.’

Taki faced him through the bars. Hans remained seated, staring from beneath the gauze strip around his head. It wasn’t an impasse so much as a sizing up. They were alone for the first time.

‘I came to find out about your relationship with Captain Wolfstadt,’ Taki stated clearly. He’d rehearsed the words in his room earlier that morning. ‘Given your claims regarding defection and your choice to defect to the Fifteenth Armoured Division specifically, your past with Klaus is too uncanny for me to accept as mere coincidence. Exactly what was the nature of your relationship with him before you parted ways?’

Taki relied on the fact that yesterday Hans had been forthcoming with all of his answers. Even where he wavered for reasons of self-preservation, he appeared regretful that he wasn’t able to disclose all he wished.

Now, however, he made absolutely no response whatsoever. His features reminded Taki of a blank, steel wall. The silence of steel lasted almost half a minute. Taki waited.

‘I’m curious,’ said Hans at last, in a voice so level he seemed to have measured it with a ruler. ‘Does anyone else here have any idea about the nature of your relationship with your knight?’

Panic flared in Taki’s chest. Hans’ face remained impassive.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Although his voice was controlled enough, Taki was sure his eyes betrayed him. He felt stripped bare, as if he suddenly stood beneath the icy, prickly light of interrogation. The train had rumbled beneath them as Taki came again and again into Klaus' hand, the same hand that had felt out his pulses, strumming to the throes of his pain and pleasure. Taki clenched his teeth. Somehow this one question from a man sitting behind bars seemed in a far more sinister league than any question thrown by Katsuragi from Home Affairs.

‘My question, admittedly, was based on a vague premise. But I believe the meaning itself should be clear enough to you.’

He’s bluffing, Taki thought. He’s probing to test my reaction.

‘My men are under no illusion regarding Klaus’ origins,’ he began. ‘Our alliance may appear strange to others –’

‘I am not speaking of origins or alliance,’ Hans interrupted quietly. Taki’s skin prickled all the more.

‘Then I have no idea what you’re referring to.’

The taste of Klaus, or the vivid memory of it, invaded his senses. Salty. Strong. Imposing. He remembered his knees on cold tiles, his drenched hair, the wild fury in Klaus’ gaze thinly veiling his hurt and confusion. Being pinned on the bed, Klaus’ cock tearing into his body, the merciless pounding, the unimaginable pain. The angry, hungry kisses which gave way to deep, enveloping blackness which gave way to the gentle light of evening spilling through the window in a different bed, with a different pair of anxious eyes watching over him.

Something shifted in Hans’ gaze, though Taki could not say what. He could almost see a faint, dawning light glazing his features.

‘The army doctor. Second-lieutenant Suguri, I believe,’ he pronounced carefully. ‘He knows, doesn’t he?’

The temperature dropped. Taki suddenly found himself longing for the Duchess’ cold, oily gaze and Berkut's one-minded hatred. They were an enemy he understood.

‘Forgive me, Commander,’ said Hans. ‘That last one was a wild guess based on deduction and observation from yesterday. Regarding everything else… simply put, I can only read jealousy, ill-disguised jealousy at that, in your original question about my relationship with your captain.’

‘That was not –’

‘And combined with Klaus’ endearing display of possessiveness yesterday in this cell, I don’t think I’m far off the mark.’ Here, he smiled as if finally acknowledging the dangerous, ironic lilt of his words. ‘I find it intriguing that in such a short time I have inadvertently inspired jealousy in both of you. It’s flattering, in fact.’

Taki didn’t have time to absorb the damning accuracy of his statement. He gathered hit wits and confirmed his suspicions. Hans didn’t know anything. He was merely feeling about blindly after hitting upon their closeness as commander and knight. Nothing more.

‘I didn’t come here to engage with your idle fantasies. My question was directly related to your decision to defect here, at the –’

‘ _Barely having turned twenty, already the young commander is making waves in his district_ ,’ Hans said suddenly and coolly. He stood up and walked towards the window. ‘ _His strategy has already won the Euroteans considerable ground on the Eastern front, with minimum casualties and a striking regard for the principles of honour that define his nation. Prisoners of war are always returned unharmed and the terms of surrender accepted without question. Having trained for a brief year in our nation’s own Luckenwalde, Taki Reizen returned to his homeland at the outbreak of -_ '

‘What is that?’

‘That was an article published for a brief time in a small magazine in my country; a magazine of no note or importance. Something I happened to come across by sheer chance. It was banned soon after, of course. I don’t know how anything vaguely favourable to Eurote or your country slipped through in the first place. But it was the first time I heard about you. And ever since, I’ve been following your movements. I learned what I could from staged questions to my superiors, through hijacked military channels, anything at my disposal. I know you, Commander Reizen.’

He was still gazing out the window, though what he could see through the narrow slit Taki could only guess. Taki was only able to observe the soft, delicate peach of dawn slowly burning into proper sunlight.

‘I know how you think. I’ve always been good at reading people. I knew that Klaus had also gone to Luckenwalde, and when I heard that he defected with you, in all likelihood _for_ you, I knew I had found the place where I would stage my own defection. So you see,’ he turned to Taki now and his eyes were suddenly piercing where they had once been removed and cold. ‘It is no coincidence that I came here, but my reasons are not malevolent. I hope you understand that. In many ways, Klaus and I are the same.’

Unaccountably, Taki felt defensive.

‘I’m more inclined to believe Klaus who says you’re nothing alike.’

Hans considered him without smiling though Taki somehow felt as though he were being derided. _I memorised the entire article about you_ , his look said. _What does that tell you about my devotion?_

‘I’m sorry to take the conversation on a different track,’ Hans said somewhat more matter-of-factly. ‘But I have received word that my own men, whom I believe are being held in another wing of this building, are quite understandably under the impression that I am a traitor and brought them all here to be made prisoners. They are not wrong in the slightest. Only Liedermann and Straffberg knew the plan from the beginning and are on my side. To make matters a little thorny, however, it appears the rest of my men are plotting with your own soldiers, the ones who are detaining them.’

‘Plotting what?’

‘To kill me in my cell.’

Another silence fell.

‘How do you know this?’

‘I can’t tell you, it may jeopardise my source’s safety. But it is reliable information. I believe I am in immediate danger.’

‘Until I know for sure whether it's true, I can’t possibly stop it.’

Hans nodded slowly. ‘No. No, I suppose you can’t. Still…’ He returned to his cot and sat down, adjusting his gauze bandage slightly. His dark, red-tinged hair took on the glow of dawn. His legs stretched out interminably. ‘I thought it would be prudent to tell you about it.’

Taki wondered what he might do. Speak to the lieutenant in charge of the prisoners? He might well be part of the assassination plot. And that’s even if Hans was telling the truth.

‘It is quite symbolic and almost poetic, actually,’ Hans mused, with the air of turning over a delicate, interesting feather he’d found, ‘for both sides to have united so swiftly and completely in their common hatred of me. It’s something Klaus is also quite familiar with, I’m sure. Does he speak to you about it? No, I doubt it. He would keep that sort of thing to himself and wear a large smile instead to cover it up.’

Every time Hans spoke Klaus’ name, Taki felt as though he was brushing lightly against a wound.

‘Have you ever asked him?’ Hans asked, gently but with a sharp, glass-like edge to his voice. ‘What it’s like to have given everything up for you? How it feels to be so hated by everyone he’s with now and everyone he’s left behind?’

The surge of guilt, like so much else over the course of that conversation, was entirely unexpected.

‘I will look into what you’ve told me,’ Taki said formally. ‘About the death threat.’

He turned to leave, painfully aware that his visit had accomplished nothing and undone far too much.

‘Thank you, Commander. I would consider it a personal favour to me if you were somehow able to prevent my death in this cell. I’d prefer to die somewhere with a better view.’

Before he left, Taki saw Hans staring out the small slit of a window again.

* * *

For two days, things were relatively quiet in the Fifteenth Armoured Division. Taki’s delicate and not-so-delicate questioning hadn’t been able to uncover any assassination plot against Hans Regenwalde so he diverted his attention to general strategy meetings with Hasebe and Uemura. He was beginning to see the kidney-shapes of topographic maps when he closed his eyes.

There had been nothing but radio silence from Klaus and his team.

He returned to his room in the late afternoon feeling oddly drained, despite not having done anything particularly draining.

The only culprit he could think of was a dream from the previous night. He and Klaus had stood on a sunset-drenched cliff face somewhere bleak and foreboding if not for the epic colour palette. It occurred to Klaus, suddenly, that they had been childhood friends for years and years. Yeah, he went on, his smile as wide as the horizon, don’t you remember? After we first met under the swaying purple flowers, I moved in next door. I became younger, you know, so I could be closer to your age. Taki remembered frowning at this, annoyed that he’d gone to so much trouble. And we were best friends for our entire childhood, practically in-fucking-separable, Klaus finished in triumph. He stared sideways at Taki, his short spikes of hair buffeted by the amber breeze. Do you remember? Yes, Taki had to admit. There they were, round-faced and wide-eyed, Taki teaching Klaus how to pour tea correctly with a little toy China set, Klaus teaching Taki how to analyse and differentiate varieties of snails before pocketing them. Sure, they’d had years together. And somehow they’d just forgotten it all. Let’s try not to forget again, Klaus decided.

Taki had awoken knowing they probably would.

He carried the orange of his dream’s overbearing, blazing sunset with him as he opened the door into his dark, silent room. It was still light outside but the curtains were drawn. All he wanted to do was collapse under the covers.

‘Finally,’ said a deep voice in the gloom.

Taki jumped out of his skin and backed into a nearby side table. The contents wobbled precariously.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t think of how else to scare the shit out of you.’

‘Klaus?’

Taki’s eyes adjusted. Klaus was sitting in the armchair by the window and finished off his scotch in one swig. Boots muddy, clothes shabby and stained. His hair was dry and unkempt, making it appear even more straw-like than usual. Even his face looked somewhat haggard, if pleased. Taki succumbed to a wave of disbelief and a strange, tingling relief in his extremities. He remained where he was against the sideboard and his mind tried to catch up.

‘When did you get back?’ 

‘To the compound? About two hours ago. Smuggled in the back of a supply truck. I really didn’t think you’d need the cloak-and-dagger stuff. But headquarters wanted to keep my whereabouts under wraps.’

He got up and stretched and poured himself another scotch. Taki noted how even in this huge bedroom, he seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of it.

Klaus, meanwhile, was rather enjoying the still-startled expression on Taki’s face.

‘We found the base,’ he said simply. ‘Exactly where Regenwalde said it would be. They didn’t catch us on the way in, so we did a lot of recon. But on the way out, they spotted us. We had enough of a lead to escape most of them, but a few relentless bastards kept at it. Bit of mid-air firing, couple of hits. _Arai_ pulled through beautifully, though.’

Taki’s heart was suddenly pounding. Klaus was standing in front him and yet, ridiculously, he was hanging onto his every word expecting to hear about the moment of Klaus’ death.

‘Lost two in that fight,’ said Klaus, eyes on his drink, mind on the men he'd lost days ago and the squadron he'd lost years ago. ‘Nishihara and Toruda.’ He drank. ‘And then they got one of my engines but _Arai_ took me right over the water like a champ, ended up about two klicks west of our base. Landed smooth as a fucking seagull even with a busted engine. And then the next morning, the jeeps found me. Our guys, fairly high up. Can’t remember their names, don’t really care. Apparently the same happened to the other boys and they want to feed the Alliance false intelligence saying we’re all dead. So I’m dead, as far as the world is concerned, as is everyone else on that mission. So the Alliance thinks the information we gathered died with us.’

‘What did you find?’

‘It’s not sexy. But it’s important. They built railways. From the airbase to ground bases to camps to the actual front lines. They’re shipping supplies in and out. We have photos of all of them. We know how they’re getting all their shit for the Eastern front.’

Taki thought quickly, a tempered excitement mounting.

‘Which means it’s –’

‘Probably our best shot. If we can cut off their supply line to the front, they’re screwed. They’ll have to retreat or surrender. Especially with all the heat they're getting at home, no chance they'll have the resources to rebuild if the current line is totally destroyed. Pretty much no casualties. Good way to win a war. I figured you’d like that.’

Taki stared, unable to place his emotion.

‘Why didn’t headquarters tell us about all this?’

‘They’re about to. They don’t trust the usual lines of communiques anymore, not for something this important. There’s more spies than soldiers around these days. Anyway, I bet Hasebe’s being briefed now in person. I said I’d take you.’ He winked.

‘So,’ Taki said, straightening himself. All his drowsiness and anxiety had immediately dissipated. He thought ahead, picked out names, planned the strategy. ‘We’ll need to put our best team together for this, get a few extra hands from the other divisions. It would have to start tomorrow. Tonight itself if possible, if the recon photos are good enough. Before the Alliance starts to reroute.’

‘With your permission,’ Klaus said, his smile fading slightly. He put the glass on the table and looked Taki in the eye. ‘I want to volunteer.’

_No._

There was a short pause.

‘Why?’

‘Because I think I’d be useful. Don't get me wrong. I've had enough train missions to last a lifetime.'

A tan coat drenched in blood. Taki flinched.

'But really,' he continued, 'I was on the recon mission so I know exactly where to go. Besides that, I could translate, intercept, bewitch, befuddle, amaze. You know, all the things I’m so good at. Being a Saxon is my one strength here and I want to use it.’

_But you only just got back._

Taki mentally shook himself. Klaus had only been gone for two days. He was being absurd. And there was the war. Always the war. He took a breath.

‘Fine.'

'Fine?'

'You have my permission.’

Klaus approached and Taki felt his pulse quicken. But Klaus only dropped to a knee. He took the hem of Taki’s coat in his left hand and stared at it for a while, considering and appreciating. He pressed it to his lips. It was something Klaus could do in the privacy of a single room that still carried as much meaning as it did on the morning of the public ceremony when they were bound to one another for life.

Let’s try not to forget again, dream-Klaus had said.

Taki reached a hand down and touched his face. He tried to recall if he’d ever done such a thing. Not like this, he realised. Wait. Yes, he had. Only once. Under the swaying wisteria. Just like then, Klaus’ skin was warm. He could feel the ridges of stubble beneath his fingertips.

_Have you ever asked him? What it’s like to have given everything up for you?_

Klaus pressed Taki’s hand against his face and wondered if he was imagining, in Taki’s eyes, something of the distance he’d felt in the past few days. It had felt as though the membrane between them had stretched and morphed and contorted while they were apart, but it had ultimately held fast. He’s so damn beautiful, Klaus thought. I want to break him.

‘I want to kiss you,’ he said instead. Statement. Question. Permission. Whatever. He’d said it once before.

Taki dropped his gaze. He tried to step back. Klaus reluctantly let go of his hand.

‘We need to speak to Hasebe and organise… organise everything.’

It took them both a second or two to realise Klaus hadn’t let go of Taki’s coat. Klaus glanced down at his own hand in surprise. Then he gripped it tightly and looked back up.

‘Taki.’

His voice echoed painfully somewhere behind Taki’s solar plexus. Taki felt his face flush, his breathing strained. Not again, he thought. Control yourself.

Klaus’ singular thought was that Taki didn’t say no. Then again, he also didn’t say what he needed to hear.

‘Taki,’ he implored, holding onto his coat with both hands.

‘Let go.’

‘I told you before. I promised I wouldn’t touch you.’

‘We can’t… waste time in here. We have to go. Let go.’

Something strong and urgent had taken root in Klaus. He felt his lips form words his mind hadn’t even processed.

‘I swore I would never touch you. And I’ve already come close to breaking my vow. So you have to say yes. I can’t… You have to say yes.’

Taki tried to prise his coat out of Klaus’ grip. He tried to step away. He tried to stop himself from slipping into his golden, laser-sharp gaze.

‘Klaus, let go.’ His voice shook.

‘You have to say yes. Do you understand? I can’t anymore, not unless you say it.’

Taki felt tears spring to his eyes and then stream down his cheeks like impertinent children. He covered his face. He couldn’t jump from the cliff. Not even when Klaus was next to him. The colour of that sunset was just too strong. Too unreal.

Klaus could take him. He could throw him to the ground and ravish him again, leave him bleeding and buckled. But not this. This was the one thing Klaus couldn’t ask of him.

‘Let go of me!’

‘Say yes.’

‘I can’t! Klaus, I can’t.’

‘You have to say yes.’

The tears didn't let up. Even through the hem of his coat, Klaus felt Taki breaking and felt himself break for having caused it. And yet he persisted. It was all he could do. They were on the edge of something.

‘Say yes.’

‘Klaus, please...’

‘I have to hear you say it. Please.’

‘ _Yes!_ ’ he choked. ‘Yes!’

The kiss was like the first breath of air after being underwater for far too long. Taki lost himself in it. He was swept backwards, then up, then his feet off the ground, then his back against the wall. The membrane was not enough, not in that moment. Klaus wanted to sear them to one another. Taki's smell was intoxicating. Petals and sweat.

Suddenly, the need for Klaus was explosive. It fired up in strange places, from Taki's chest to his fingertips. He felt his cock strain painfully. He held Klaus’ neck beneath his ears, ran a hand through the back of his head, surrendered completely.

Klaus suddenly shifted momentum and Taki was thrown backwards onto the bed. Before he’d had time to catch his breath, Klaus held him down and ground him into the mattress with another kiss. His coat was pulled away, then the rest of his clothes. Klaus bit and kissed his way down Taki’s neck.

Taki’s moans and gasps felt like they were summoned from another realm. He’s so small, Klaus thought, his penis rigid. I’m going to break him. He _wants_ me to break him.

He licked and thrust his tongue into Taki, tasting him deeply. Taki held his hair, his back arched, his neck bent and rock-hard penis quivering. Klaus nearly lost it. He straightened and lined himself up. Taki glanced up through heavily-lidded eyes, held out a hand towards Klaus’ chest and –

Three heavy bangs sounded on the door.

‘Taki-sama!’

Time held its breath in that low-lit room. Taki and Klaus were dimly aware of Suguri’s voice but neither accepted it for several seconds. Klaus even had the desperate thought that he would fuck Taki anyway, even if the goddamn Kaiser himself was on the other side of the door.

But the look on Taki’s face was enough to bring him back to Earth.

Before Taki found his voice, Suguri banged on the door again.

‘Taki-sama, I’m sorry but I’m coming in!’

There was a minor scuffle on the other side, perhaps the soldier on patrol didn’t want to let him in, but rank was rank. Suguri came through the door just as Klaus rolled off Taki and the latter tried to cover himself with a blanket.

The soldier, thankfully, had enough sense to remain outside, out of sight. Suguri however, took in the incriminating scene, mouth agape. Taki had flushed crimson and tried to scramble for his clothes. Klaus, heart still hammering a million beats a minute, braced himself on his elbows, hung his head and let out a private sigh-groan.

Suguri’s face hardened and he collected himself.

‘Taki-sama. Apologies for the intrusion.’ The words came out forced and awful. It was only then that Taki and Klaus both noticed that his entire shirt front was covered in blood. ‘But Regenwalde has just been shot in his cell.’


	6. Just the One Extra Dimension

Ringing bicycle bells, a dusty football field.

The cicadas droned relentlessly in the harsh summer afternoon, giving the illusion that the sound emanated from the baking ground itself, crushed under the weight of the sun. Classes were over for the day and students streamed out the doors of the school building. Most were heading home but some were heading for the field where a game with a rival school was just heating up.

Klaus von Wolfstadt, sixteen years old, followed the ball’s trajectory and cut in front of his defender, heart and feet thudding. With aim that felt less planned than instinctive, he lunged and kicked. The ball sailed over heads, brushing the keeper’s fingertips, and thwacked into the goal. Adrenaline surge through his limbs. It was strange, he thought, for the world to be painted gold just because he kicked a ball into a net.

Hans Regenwalde sailed past the field, ignoring the cheerful greeting of the bicycle bells that were going the other way. The soles of his feet were flat and unmoving on the pedals and his hands lightly clenched the brakes. He turned his head as unobtrusively as possible. There was no mistaking Klaus who stood a head taller than everyone else, his teammates crowding him happily. From beneath awkwardly flapping bangs, Hans watched.

‘Look out!’

He swerved his bike instinctively, just managing to miss a group of boys sprawled on the ground near a bench. A tinkle of glass told him he’d sent a bottle flying.

Stopping his bike with one foot on the ground, he turned to see the damage. One bottle of beer was lying on its side. Two others were intact. And no one was hurt.

‘Watch where you’re going, asshole!’

Relief turned to fear when he recognised the group. Three of them, two years his senior. Cigarettes, scowls and untucked shirts. They’d held him accountable for his strange look and strange hair and unnerving silence countless times before.

‘Hey, look! It’s the scarecrow!’

Before he’d had a chance to get his foot back on the pedal, the nearest one took him by the collar and pulled him off his bike. His mind switched from the need to defend himself to a shameful, paralysing fear. He was tall but frail. He was one against three. What good could possibly come of a scarecrow trying to fight?

Yet the instinct to do so screamed out at him with the first punch. Each blow felt red, he thought. Could physical pain feel red? And the kicks were purple. The sort of violent violet of bruises and skies at dusk. They coloured his ribs. His stomach. He curled in.

And so when there was an intervention in the outside world, in the world from before colours had begun to splotch his vision, he couldn’t quite follow what was happening. He could only faintly detect a shift in the balance of power.

‘Whatever, man,’ an unfamiliar voice eventually said. ‘I’m going back to the game. You’ll be lucky if they don’t suspend you for that.’

Hans opened an eye that was turning swiftly from purple to lime green. He recognised the feeling of that colour. It would bruise later. He lifted his head.

One of his attackers crouched nearby, cradling his nose. The other two flanked him, braced but fearful.

‘Suspend _me?_ I’m the goddamn hero here.’

That voice Hans knew. A huge hand appeared and helped him to his feet. Hans blinked and tried to focus. Two players from Klaus’ team were heading back to the field. Klaus himself was looking at him closely.

‘You’re in my class, aren’t you? Hans, right?’

Hans made no reply and breathed heavily through his nose, trying to regain his balance.

Up close, Klaus was surprised how tall he was. He probably carried himself shorter.

Klaus remembered the origami. The tears as Hans was sent from the room. He tried to keep his words and tone casual even though a twisted, dragon-like creature was squirming in his gut. It had something to do with guilt and injustice; a potent combination of the two.

He glanced at the boy on the ground who was now emitting high-pitched whimpers. Hans followed his gaze. Blood trickled from between the boy’s fingers.

‘Shit,’ Klaus observed. ‘I think I broke his nose. They might actually suspend me.’

He let out a gold laugh.

* * *

While leading the way, Suguri managed to stealthily observe the pair of them. Taki’s face was still quite flushed. Klaus hurried after him, still buttoning his shirt. Both their gazes were cast to the ground though there was a hint of a smile playing on Klaus’ lips. Suguri bristled and turned his eyes to the front. Arrogant fool.

Suguri had spent more nights than he cared to admit lying awake and wondering what to make of Taki’s relationship with the westerner. Each time he scrounged together a theory, something new would come barrelling out of the darkness and perplex him all over again.

The very first theory was that Taki saw something in Klaus, some skill or experience or knowledge or even perspective, that he believed would be useful to them in the war. At the time, Suguri and everyone else considered it an unwise and rash decision, to be sure, but simply an error of judgment. Beyond that, no one even ventured a guess as to the extent of their closeness. No one had the imagination for it, Suguri realised.

And then came the foreigner's insubordination, the arrogance, the blatant disregard for rank and order, the unchecked rudeness, tempered only by his unquestionable, unwavering loyalty to his master. Suddenly, the original theory didn’t make sense.

It was around that time that Suguri began to wonder about the strength of their friendship. He knew about the power of certain ties, those inexplicable connections forged despite time and place. Perhaps Taki Reizen and Klaus von Wolfstadt were similar in a way no one else could identify. Perhaps it was a bond of mutual admiration and respect. A bond of brothers. In any case, it explained Taki’s poor judgment.

The wrecking ball that tore down this theory came in the form of Klaus at his doorstep with a broken and unconscious Taki in his arms. Nearly a month had passed since and yet Suguri could still feel the shock. He remembered how long it took for his mind to accept the truth of what was before him. A thin film of unreality covered everything he could see. Truth be told, Suguri was still struggling to peel it off.

No. Not a bond of brothers. Something far, far different. Something unthinkable.

He had held the gun to Klaus’ forehead. He wondered if there was an alternate universe where he had pulled the trigger. Probably not, he decided. His actions were the immediate aftereffect of shock. Of trembling, overwhelming anger. Of the need to right a wrong that could never again be righted. The rose had been broken, and that was that. A dead Saxon lying in his room wouldn’t have made any difference.

They left the building and walked into the crisp evening air, tinged by the scent of a distant bushfire. The sun was disappearing, racing them to the horizon.

Suguri’s theory after that terrible incident centred on the roles of violator and victim. Of course Suguri didn’t know exactly what to make of Klaus’ patent remorse and self-loathing which had hung in that room like a vapour cloud. There was sincerity in his request that Suguri do everything in his power to help Taki. But he had chalked this up to the complexities of Klaus’ dangerous psyche; perhaps even evidence of sociopathy. Violator and victim. It was simple.

But when Taki opened his eyes, asked only a few questions and flew to Klaus’ side without even a passing thought about his own injuries, Suguri was yet again left in the dark. He couldn’t fathom it. He couldn't fathom them. And when he watched Klaus kneel and Taki crouch over him, when Taki held his unconscious form all night, Suguri gave up completely. It occurred to him that perhaps the truth about their relationship eluded even them. This thought, however, failed to dispel any of his anxieties.

He’d kept their secret because there was nothing else he could conceivably do with it.

Klaus had pulled a large hooded coat and scarf over his head and face in a weak attempt to hide his identity. Taki knew he believed headquarters was overreacting and so didn’t particularly feel the need to uphold their orders. After all, hooded coats and scarves couldn’t do much about the fact that no one else in the compound measured anywhere near six foot four.

They briskly walked up the hallway towards the infirmary where they were joined by an anxious-looking Hasebe. Nurses bustled to and fro, some carrying bloody bandages.

The images from only minutes ago swam before Suguri; his knife-like intrusion into their closed little world that left them reeling in the dim light, scrambling for clothes. The decision materialised very slowly, like it was reluctant to show itself. After what he’d just seen, perhaps it was finally time to confront Taki about his knight.

‘You said he was stable?’

Taki’s voice snapped him back to the present.

‘Stable but critical.’

‘How the hell can you be both?’ Klaus asked.

‘We’ve done all we can to stop the bleeding. Two clean shots, passing all the way through. But it broke a rib and punctured a lung. It’ll take a day or two to find out if he’ll recover from that. For now, he’s stable enough. And coming in and out of consciousness. Every time he came to, he asked to see Taki and refused to answer anyone’s questions about what happened. If you want to talk to him, it’s now, before I put him under.’

They drew alongside his bed. He was tall enough that his heels hung off the edge of the thin mattress. Oxygen mask, heavily bandaged chest, bloody pile of clothes and sheets on the floor. Despite all of that, his thin, chiselled face and rested features gave every appearance of deep, peaceful sleep.

The nurse approached, looking guilty.

‘Sorry, sir. I had to put him under. We were worried we were going to lose him, his breathing was ragged.’

Suguri checked heartbeat through a stethoscope. ‘That’s alright. Probably the right call.’ He glanced at Taki. ‘We’ll have to wait a day or so before we find out what happened.’

Hans had known. He had asked Taki to protect him and he’d failed. The sensation was not new but it was difficult to stomach.

‘I want a full investigation,’ he said to Hasebe. ‘Talk to everyone, starting with Lieutenant Tagada. Ask him how this happened under his watch. Then speak to the men who patrol and supervise the holding cells. Hans knew about a plot against his life.’

Hasebe hesitated. ‘With all due respect, Taki-sama. This is a political prisoner. I don’t know if we should run the risk of alienating our own men just for the sake of…’

He clammed up under Taki’s glare. He bowed stiffly and turned on his heel. Klaus bit back a smile.

After Hasebe left, Taki gazed at Hans’ calm features which, by now, had almost become familiar. His face revealed just as little when he was awake as when he was unconscious.

Silence fell in their corner of the infirmary, punctuated by the footsteps of nurses and rolling wheels of a bed being trundled past.

‘The first time we met,’ Klaus said suddenly from beside Taki, ‘or met properly, anyway, he was being beaten up by these older guys at our school. I helped him out. We were kind of friends for a while after that. I mostly felt bad for him but I think I might also have liked him, maybe. Never fully trusted him though. Hard to trust someone who keeps so much to himself.’

It sounded like he’d had more to say on the topic. Perhaps he’d even had a conclusion of sorts in mind. But nothing else emerged. Klaus was watching Hans thoughtfully. For once, Taki couldn’t read much into Klaus’ expression. It was as though he had borrowed Hans’ enigma for a moment. They shared a past that Taki could only hear about.

Hasebe returned and reported in a taught voice that he’d organised for interrogations to take place tomorrow. ‘In the meantime, there’s a meeting in the general room,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I think we’re good to start the operation tonight. I assume you’ve been briefed?’

Casting one last look at Hans, Taki turned to head out of the infirmary. ‘Klaus informed me of the situation.’ After a pause, he added, ‘And he will be taking part in the mission.’

Hasebe did a commendable job of keeping his face neutral. ‘Understood, sir.’ 

* * *

The meeting only took an hour. Time was a decisive factor. The sooner they had feet on the ground, stealing through the darkness towards the railway line deep in the heart of the forest, the better their chances for victory. On top of that, planning went smoothly due to the simple fact that their advantage was significant. The Alliance didn’t know how much they knew, or even if they knew anything at all. In an incredibly short space of time, the West’s defeat seemed palpable. Taki knew it was almost entirely thanks to a man who lay on the point of death in the infirmary.

Klaus would head a special ops team of fifty. Beyond that they would deploy a platoon for backup and for diversion purposes. The plan came together as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. Taki tried to push memories of No Man’s Land out of his mind as he moved coloured counters about on the map. This was nothing like that terrible mission. This time they knew their objective, they had a solid plan, Klaus had fifty men and an entire platoon, not just Azusa and a few grenades.

The first leg would be via jeep and motorbike and would begin that night at 2100 sharp. Boats would be waiting at the harbour. Then it was on foot from there. In total, according to optimistic projections, the mission would take two weeks.

The meeting dispersed with a strange mix of optimism and tense expectancy. The men who were part of the operation left to gather their equipment with the weight of the war on their shoulders. Klaus alone seemed relaxed and in no hurry. Indeed, he was almost looking forward to his upcoming extended trip on his bike. Only when Taki got up and left did he do the same.

At the entrance to the building, they came across Suguri who appeared to have been waiting.

‘Taki-sama,’ he said quietly. His arms were folded and he stared intently at his shoes. ‘May I speak to you alone for a few minutes?’

Taki’s pulse picked up just a little. Suguri may have wanted to discuss any number of things, including the pressing matter of Hans’ condition, but for some reason he felt self-conscious. He avoided Klaus’ eye and followed Suguri. Klaus, of course, shadowed Taki until they reached Suguri’s office, at which point Suguri reminded him in clipped tones about the conventional meaning of the word ‘alone’ and slammed the door in his face.

* * *

Just as there were many different kinds of rain or sunlight, there were many different kinds of silences. Taki slipped immediately into one that was unfamiliar and humiliating. He waited for Suguri to walk around to his desk and place both hands on it. The second-lieutenant's age suddenly came through sharply in the lines around his mouth and eyes and the thinness of his hair.

‘Do you love him?’

The question was a shock in and of itself. To hear it come from Suguri of all people was a different monster entirely. Taki opened his mouth, felt the heat rise to his face and stared at the furthest corner of the room. He couldn’t even begin to imagine a response.

Suguri made a noise like a sigh. ‘From your reaction I gather that you do and that he probably doesn’t know.’

Taki was forcibly reminded of his conversation with Hans only a few days ago. He wanted to disappear into the ground.

‘It might not be my place, Taki-sama, but I am… worried. About you.’

He paused to consider his words carefully.

‘I feel like you might be in over your head. Am I right?’

There was a gruff, open honesty about Suguri. Taki had the fleeting urge to confess everything. The urge passed almost as soon as it arrived.

‘I appreciate your concern,’ he began gingerly. ‘I know I’ve – we’ve – put you in an uncomfortable position. But I assure you I’m fine. Everything’s under control.’

Suguri let the words sink in.

‘If nothing else,’ he said, his voice tensing. ‘You haven’t given your body enough time to heal since the – since it happened.’

Taki could tell that his whole face had been swallowed in scarlet. This was almost worse than being caught in flagrante delicto earlier that evening.

‘We didn’t… do anything,’ he said lamely, aware of the ludicrousness of his words.

‘That’s… well, be that as it may, it doesn't change anything else. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten your duty, Taki-sama. To your country. Your people. This kind of behaviour is an insult to everything that –’

Suguri stopped. He saw a flash of something pass over Taki’s features. He couldn’t be sure what it was, but in that moment a tiny portal had opened and he saw Taki’s personal torment. He saw how he had fought against it and himself for a long time. A fragment of the picture fell into place. Despite everything, Suguri’s heart went out to him. He struggled to come back to his original argument.

‘Look, Taki-sama. Forgive me, I know you know all of this. But if things like country and people seem like distant ideas, at least think of your men. God forbid they ever see you like I saw you that day.’

‘They will never – I would never –’

‘I advise you to put aside this… whatever this is. With Wolfstadt. Just for now, until the end of the war. I know I am out of line, but please try to understand. My willingness to break rank; it’s a mark of how important I think it is.’

_Put aside this… whatever this is._

Whatever this is.

Taki unclenched his fist, and only in doing so did he realised he had it clenched in the first place.

Whatever this is.

It was a large, hulking presence in the corner of his eye wherever he went. It was the breathlessness caused by hands and lips. It was a plane flying upside down and in loops.

There was another kind of silence now. Something had shifted in the air. Power is such a delicate thing, Suguri thought. It can change in the very air around you.

‘I forgive your speaking out of turn.' Taki met Suguri's gaze head on. 'Your counsel has always meant a lot to me, more than just as a second-lieutenant. I owe you a great deal.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Suguri sounded nervous.

‘But Klaus,’ said Taki, and Suguri was taken aback by the way he spoke his name. ‘Klaus is my knight, bound to me until death. I chose him. He makes me stronger, and strength is something my men can see.’

A third and altogether different silence reigned. Suguri saw a glimmer of the Reizen bloodline in Taki’s posture and steadfast defiance. Compared to his awkward bursts of dialogue, the brevity and simplicity of Taki’s response was striking.

Suguri reassessed. He wondered if he had come any closer to understanding. A few seconds were enough to confirm that no, he had not.

In any case, he had tried.

He sighed and cast a wary glance at his half-open window. ‘I sincerely hope Wolfstadt isn’t prowling about nearby. I don’t like to imagine what hearing that would have done for his ego.’

* * *

On a bench in the courtyard, out of earshot, Klaus toed the ground and stared at the stars. There was only a scattering of them under the glare of the compound’s lights. He toed the ground, stared at the stars and waited for Taki.

 _Waiting for Taki_ , he realised, would be the name of his biography. He felt immediately sorry for the sucker who would have to write it.

Footsteps sounded from the opposite direction of Suguri’s office. Klaus readjusted his scarf and hood, feeling utterly stupid. Around the corner, a lanky figure approached and stopped before Klaus, pink in the cheeks from jogging. He had missed doing up one of the buttons in his cadet uniform and his hair appeared to have been halfway brushed.

‘Hey, Haruki.’

‘Klaus-sama. I saw you from my dorm window.’

‘How’d you know it was me? With my amazing disguise and all.’

‘Disguise?’

Klaus snorted. ‘Figured.’

‘Am I intruding?’

‘Nope. Have a seat.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Haruki bowed before he sat. Klaus was tickled. He gratefully pulled off his scarf and hood.        

They listened to the crickets chirp for a while. Even with the artificial light of the lampposts, as night bore down on them, the trees of the courtyard gradually became more shadow than solid. Klaus fancied he could make out a pair of bulbous nocturnal eyes somewhere on one of the branches. The scene was deceptively still. In less than twenty minutes, Klaus would be careening through the night towards the enemy. Away from Taki.

‘There’s a rumour about you, Klaus-sama.’

Haruki sounded both nervous and excited, as though he knew he was pushing his luck.

‘This should be good.’

‘They say you flew a plane recently.’

Klaus was impressed. ‘There’s a well-informed cadet somewhere.’

‘So it’s true?’

‘Sure is. Maybe don’t tell anyone I told you though.’

‘Woah! What was it like?’

Klaus ran a hand through his hair. For some reason, he pictured Taki watching him from the ground as he climbed into the cockpit. ‘Pretty damn amazing.’

He glanced down to see Haruki’s unusually large eyes soaking up his words. He chuckled and thought about it a bit more.

‘It’s funny, when you’re flying, you add just the one extra dimension, the up-down dimension, but suddenly you feel like you can do anything. Humans are pretty stupid, when you get down to it.’

This prompted a moment's deliberation. ‘I think the up-down dimension is amazing. It’s only one more, but it’s such a good one. Most people go their whole lives without feeling it.’

‘You have a point there. Not bad, kid.’

Haruki blushed faintly.

‘Killed any bad guys with my gun yet?’

He laughed. ‘Not yet, sir.’

The kid had an easy smile. Klaus felt a sense of paternal warmth when he was around him. More like fraternal, he decided. No need to age himself prematurely.

He noted that Haruki had grown recently. His uniform was straining around the shoulders and a little short above the ankle.

‘How old are you?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘That’s a good age. I liked fourteen.’

Haruki seemed to hesitate. ‘When you were fourteen, did you –?’

He was cut off by the sound of footsteps, this time from Suguri’s office. When Taki strode into view, Haruki sprang upright and saluted. Taki’s preoccupied expression softened somewhat when he recognised Haruki.

‘Cadet Yamamoto.’

‘Sir.’

Over his shoulder, Haruki flashed Klaus a grin before heading back to his dorm. Klaus winked.

Taki walked over, his jade coat catching lightly in the breeze. Klaus took a few seconds to appreciate how the moonlight reflected off Taki’s hair. Then he languidly got to his feet.

‘So. We’re not in too much trouble with Dad, are we?’

For a brief moment, Klaus dared to imagine that Taki’s lips twitched.

They walked in silence. Trees marched past in obedient rows on either side of them. At length, they approached the compound’s west exit where the rest of the team was gathering. Bikes, jeeps and fifty dark figures making preparations and speaking in hushed voices. A few turned and saluted when Taki approached but he indicated with a wave of his hand that they needn’t worry about formalities.

Klaus had parked his bike further inside the compound, away from the others. When he reached it, he shouldered the bag he had packed earlier. Taki stood nearby, surveying the silent preparations of the men closer to the gate. He turned to Klaus.

‘Do you have everything you need?’

‘Yep. Didn’t take long to grab it all. The bike’s in top condition too. Nothing to worry about.'

Taki said nothing. This was different to their farewell at the airbase. This was not a simple recon mission. And unlike the recon mission, Taki could suddenly think of no good reason why he wasn’t going with Klaus.

‘Hold down the fort for us, won’t you?’ said Klaus as though reading his mind. He set his jaw and buckled his helmet on. ‘Get those Alliance guys to turn the other way while we sneak in and unplug them from behind.’

Taki met his eyes and nodded once.

Klaus straddled the bike. ‘I may have been half-lying before. When you asked why I wanted to volunteer. It’s really because I want to win the war for you.’

The bike roared to life.

‘Sometimes I feel like I love you so much I could win it single-handedly.’ His eyes glinted behind the goggles that Taki had handed to him beside the _Arai_. ‘Have I said that before already? Sounds familiar.’

Taki felt a bolt of surprise and embarrassment and looked away. It was the very first time Klaus had said the word, and, bizarrely enough, the second time Taki had heard it that night.

The clouds obscured the moon for a brief while, almost at the same time that a bat darted in front of the nearest lamp. For a fraction of a second, the entire world was black.

More specifically, Klaus had used the word _aishiteru_ , which, even if one wasn’t the son of an imperial dynasty, was a word one didn’t hear a great deal in that country. It didn’t carry the same gravity and significance as the Western notion of love. Taki couldn’t be sure if Klaus was ignorant of this fact or simply did not care. In any case, his embarrassment didn’t stem from the specific awkwardness of hearing a foreigner misuse a word. It came from the fact that Klaus had managed, in that singular way of his, to attach gravity, significance, sincerity, wit, brazenness and tenderness all at once to the word in a way that put its original meaning and usage to shame.

The shadows by the gate were already beginning to move out. Taki felt the small grains of sand slipping down the glassy curve. He felt as though the entire grounds could be whisked away from beneath his feet. And for what felt like the millionth time over the past few days, he was at a loss for what to say.

When he finally spoke, he couldn’t even be sure Klaus heard his murmur over the rumbling engine.

‘Just come back.’ He stared at Klaus’ gloved hand on the bike’s handle. ‘To me.’

For Klaus, the feeling was uncannily close to that of pulling the nose of a plane up off a runway. He pulled Taki into a swift, hard kiss before he could stop him. Taki threw a panicked glance at the gate. No one had seen.

Billowing coats marked their departure, both Klaus’ on the back of his bike speeding towards the gate and Taki’s which shuddered in his wake. They all filed out of the gate two or three at a time and were lost in the trees, which, unlike their counterparts within the compound, did not march obediently anywhere.


	7. Tomorrow at Thermopylae

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say a quick thank you to Hanairoh for your lovely reviews and notes. I've changed a few things in a previous chapter thanks to you :) Appreciate your support! (And everyone else's too!) Xx

During the first week, Taki held up quite well. Only a few details gave him away. His ears were always tuned to the nearest radio. He phoned headquarters a few times too often for updates, which were never forthcoming. He cast his eyes at the west exit every now and then. But no one who wasn’t paying careful attention would have picked up on it.

He threw himself into campaigns and sorties. Murakumo and the fifteenth division’s line of imposing tanks tried to draw as much Alliance attention as possible for as long as possible. He kept his word to Klaus.

Towards the end of the second week, his anxiety became slightly more palpable. He was even more taciturn than usual. Hasebe sometimes had to repeat himself before Taki heard him.

But by the end of the fourth week, even the cadets were able to see a change as he strode across the compound. His stiffness, the hard line of his mouth, his preoccupied gaze. It shook their confidence a little to see him that way. And that was if they saw him at all. He stayed in his bedroom for days between sorties, admitting only a few.

_And yet not a word. Not a single one. Surely the Western Alliance would have given some signal? Whether it was that their railways were destroyed or if it was that they stopped the attack, took everyone prisoner and executed those in charge… surely we would know by now. And yet not a word._

An internal monologue on repeat, whether he was yelling orders through Murakumo, feeling blasts that made her metal walls shudder, or sitting quietly in his room trying to battle his way through a slice of toast.

Hans Regenwalde had been one of the few who paid careful attention even as far back as the first week. He’d regained consciousness the day after Klaus’ departure and watched the interesting change in Taki’s demeanour and even appearance. During the handful of times Taki came to the infirmary to speak to Hans, his clothes and hair appeared to have suffered slightly more since his last visit.

At first, Taki came to the infirmary only to speak to Hans regarding his shooting. Hans was easily able to identify the soldier who shot him; a young private who brought him his meals and was now facing court martial.

Taki spoke to the private personally before he was taken away. Twenty-year-old Fukuo Tamura had turned his face away when Taki icily told him he’d let down his people and his country in committing such a cowardly act as shooting a man behind bars. Until that point in his speech, however, Taki had been struck by the defiance in Tamura’s gaze, something he was not used to seeing in any subordinate other than Klaus. The soldier’s hatred of Hans ran deep.

Interrogations revealed more layers of this hatred. On both sides of the bars. Hans’ men in their own cells, betrayed and seething. The guards who’d listened to their theories of Hans’ defection, their immediate mistrust, their burning need to get rid of the snake in their midst. In total, four of Taki’s men were court-martialled. Hans was right. It was striking how unifying hatred could be.

Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde now sat up in bed. It was afternoon and the infirmary was almost empty. There were bandages around his torso in addition in to his old one around the left side of his head. One of his hands was cuffed to the bed railing. A guard stood by him, posted to watch him around the clock.

Hans eyed Taki’s dull hair and the weed-like wrinkles that had begun to creep over his coat and uniform. The young commander sat in a chair, miles away, by Hans’ bedside. It was sometime in the fourth week of Klaus’ absence.

‘I’m as far from spirituality and sentimentality as it is possible to be,’ Hans said in careful, gentle tones. ‘But I have this feeling based on, shall we say, instinct. He’s alive and well.’

The fact that neither of them spoke Klaus’ name allowed it to form silently in the air. Taki became keenly aware of the guard nearby.

‘He’s always excelled. At everything he ever tried. If there was ever a person whom the Gods would personally salvage from the direst of situations, it would be Captain Wolfstadt. Who else in the world can claim that a schoolbook protected him from bullets and saved his life?’

Taki looked at him warily. He could never get used to Hans’ unsettling omnipresence.

‘How did you know about that?’

Hans’ look was clear. _I can’t tell you. Not until I have your complete trust._

‘I was hoping, Commander,’ he said instead, ‘that you were able to tell me more about the recon mission. The secret airbase I helped locate. What did you find?’

A sudden gust of wind outside hurled brown leaves at the window beside Hans’ bed. Autumn, Taki realised. It had arrived without anyone having paid attention.

He considered Hans for long moments. He was well connected. He clearly had several informants within the compound itself. It could be risky telling him anything at all.

But he’d been nothing but truthful and undeniably useful for over a month. He’d claimed his allegiance to Taki and the Fifteenth Armoured Division multiple times, despite all disbelief and hostility and even an attempt on his life. And, at that very moment, Klaus might be in trouble.

The soldier who had been guarding the prisoner since that morning didn’t hesitate when his commander dismissed him. And yet, as he left the infirmary, he felt a tingle on the back of his neck at the thought of leaving Taki-sama alone with someone so silent and unreadable.

Hans listened to Taki without interrupting. Taki felt, oddly, as though he were confessing his anxiety even though the words out of his mouth were phrased in the cold military terms of the earlier recon mission and the current one. Operation Hannibal.

‘There’s no way they could have completed the mission within two weeks,’ was Hans’ immediate assessment. ‘If the Alliance was foolhardy enough to build supply railways near the Eastern front, they would be guarded twenty-four seven. Patrols, actual outposts, everything.’

Taki’s heart sank like a stone. They’d been aware of the possibility but hearing it from Hans made it a certainty.

‘But there would be blind spots where they simply couldn't maintain constant surveillance. I’m sure Klaus and his team figured this out early on. My guess is they’re trying to find those blind spots. It’ll take time. They’d have to rework the plan from scratch. But if you haven’t heard any news, I think it’s a good sign they haven’t been caught.’

Again, Taki felt the weight of Hans’ words like a physical presence.

‘Have faith in your captain, Commander,’ said Hans. ‘Give him a bit more time.’

* * *

A dark figure emerged over the hill. Klaus tensed, hand on the trigger. A few flashes of torchlight from the figure calmed his pulse. He signalled to the others that it was only Ota and his men.

They waited in the gathering gloom for their comrades to cross the thick brush. Klaus craved a cigarette.

‘Anything?’ he asked as Lieutenant Shigeki Ota finally pushed past the trees.

He was Klaus’ second in command; a mid-sized guy in his late forties with a permanent, affable scowl. Klaus had taken to him immediately at the outset of the mission.

‘More of the same. They switch every three hours. A real changing of the royal fucking guards, no eyes are dropped anywhere. Airtight.’ He looked at Klaus gravely. ‘Except for Thermopylae.’

Klaus sighed. He crouched on the ground and picked up a stick, absently drawing two parallel lines in the dirt with arrows attacking it from a few different angles; an outline even he could barely see in the disappearing light. His men waited.

The entire length of the railway was heavily guarded except for where it ran through a narrow, rocky passage not far from where they were. But it was a hard place to watch over. With two high stone walls flanking the railway on either side, there was no room for a patrol, no cover for guards. A blind spot.

Ota and Klaus had taken to calling it Thermopylae. They’d recently begun to feel a bit like Leonidas and his three hundred men against an army of millions. And the narrow passageway was just the right amount of symbolic.

‘Thermopylae it is, then,’ Klaus said eventually. ‘We’ll move out at first light.’

Due to the passage’s unforgiving terrain and lack of cover, they’d spent a few days scouting, hoping to find a better spot, but nothing had turned up. Thermopylae was precarious but it was the only opportunity they had.

The men set up camp silently and with heavy hearts.

In his tent, Klaus settled on his back and wondered how long it would take him to fall asleep. He wished he could see through the tent roof. There was something about stars filling in the gaps of canopy that always moved him.

He heard Ota take a long piss nearby before crawling into the tent, muttering softly under his breath about mosquitoes. He settled heavily beside Klaus. They lay in silence for a while.

The mission was two whole weeks over their projections. Klaus liked to imagine that Taki was worrying himself sick about him. The unlikely image made him smile a little. He pictured his master lying alone in that huge bed with light from the lamppost outside spilling onto the bedspread in arcs.

‘Got anyone waiting at home?’ he asked Ota.

‘Yeah,’ Ota grunted. ‘Too many. Wife and mistress. Hope they haven’t found out about each other.’

Klaus chuckled. Ota was one of the few officers he’d ever met who couldn’t care less about where Klaus came from. He treated everyone, regardless of nationality, with the same mix of camaraderie and apathy.

‘You?’ Ota asked noncommittally, as though obligated.

‘I guess you could say that, yeah.’

‘Yeesh. Sounds complicated.’

Klaus lifted and dropped his eyebrows. ‘Complicated doesn’t even come close. Just the other day, I was feeling sorry for whoever decides to write my biography.’

‘No biographies till we win the war.’

‘True. First chapter starts tomorrow at Thermopylae.’

 _Or last_ , they thought simultaneously.

* * *

Taki walked beside Hans and the tense guard in silence. Hans moved cautiously but well enough for someone who had been shot twice only weeks ago. They reached a low brick wall surrounding an abandoned ammunitions shed and Hans sat, stretching his legs out in front of him. It was a habit of his, Taki realised. His legs were very long.

Earlier, in the infirmary, he’d made a comment about not having seen the sunset in over a month. He then drily apologised for having been caught out; perhaps he was guilty of being sentimental after all. There was nothing at all suggestive about his comment. But the relief Taki had felt upon hearing his advice about Klaus was potent. There was also the lingering guilt of Hans nearly being killed in Taki’s own holding cell. And, despite holding onto mistrust of varying shades in the back of his mind, there was an unassuming serenity to Hans that had lately begun to put him at ease.

And so, surprising both himself and Hans, he’d suggested a walk. The guard was called back to uncuff Hans from the bed, cuff his hands together instead, and accompany them to the perimeter.

After they’d walked and sat, Hans breathed deeply and stared at the tree line silhouetted in the setting sun. The guard stood beside them, statuesque. Taki took a few steps away, wondering why he’d come too.

‘Thank you for accompanying me,’ Hans said, cutting into his thoughts. ‘I’m sure you must be busy.’

‘Our next offensive isn’t for a few days,’ said Taki by way of excuse.

Something had been niggling in the back of his mind for a while. He hesitated.

‘Before, when you said Klaus excelled at everything he tried. What were you referring to exactly?’

A faint smile touched Hans’ lips.

‘You’ve seen what he’s capable of. His skills as a soldier and a pilot. It’s always been like that. In school, he was the golden child. Teachers, parents, students, everyone adored him. He just had a way with people. He only gave hell to the teachers he didn’t respect. He’d get sent to the principal’s office with citations like “problems with authority” but he and the principal got along so well he never got into real trouble.’

 _The teachers he didn’t respect._ Taki suddenly imagined Hasebe at the head of a classroom.

‘On top of that, he was a student leader. An athlete. He had a score of pretty girlfriends over the years.’ (At this, Taki kept his gaze trained on the ground though his pulse picked up a little.) ‘He was near the top of our class academically too. That was the only field in which I was able to rival him,’ he added with ironic modesty. ‘But I lost to him as many times as I won.’

Taki blinked. An academic Klaus? It was like trying to picture a tiger on a leash.

‘You seem surprised,’ Hans said with a hint of amusement. ‘But you must have seen some of that in him. Didn’t he become fluent in your language within just a few months of moving here? It took me several years to reach this level.’

Taki batted his hair down where a fresh draft of wind had lifted it. He felt a little dazed. On some level, he’d been aware of it, sure. But...

‘I get the feeling he doesn’t like people knowing how intelligent he really is,’ said Hans. ‘For whatever reason, he prefers to show off his brawn.’

The surprise gave way to something else. How much else didn’t he know about his own knight?

His eyes took in the courtyard without really seeing it. Around the base of the trees, a handful of light, tiny petals were strewn amid the dry leaves. Now, thanks to him, Klaus was crouching in a godforsaken forest somewhere, putting his life on the line for a country that wasn’t even his own.

He suddenly wanted very badly to be alone. He opened his mouth to excuse himself.

‘In fact, the only person I’ve met whose resume is more accomplished than Klaus’ is yours,’ Hans said before he could speak. ‘Academics, martial arts, military triumphs. Everything except the score of pretty girlfriends, it seems.’ His eyes almost twinkled though his tone remained deadpan. ‘But I suspect that owes to cultural difference more than anything else. Not to mention Klaus can be quite persuasive in that department. Or so I’ve heard.’

Taki concentrated hard on keeping his face neutral. Hans shifted gingerly on the brick wall to accommodate his wounds before carrying on. His lean, defined face and thin lips reminded Taki of marble.

‘I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful. What I originally meant to say is that it seems fated for two such remarkable individuals to have found one another.’ He paused and stared at his lap. ‘Forgive my forwardness, Commander, but it’s a bond I envy a great deal. I envy Klaus, especially. For having found such purpose.’

The words knocked about in Taki’s mind long after they parted. Hans’ gaze had affected him as well in a way he couldn’t figure out. Something both familiar and unfamiliar. He never knew what to do with those bursts of unexpected veneration. It always reminded him of Klaus, an association which, now, caused a hollow pang.

He wanted to sleep. Sleep for hours, days even, and wait for someone to wake him with news about Operation Hannibal. For a moment, before he opened the door to his empty room, he wondered if a tall, blonde man would materialise on the armchair by the window, swigging back a glass of scotch.

* * *

There was one other person in the compound who felt Klaus’ absence as keenly as did Taki. Haruki Yamamoto always instinctively looked up when Taki’s sure, firm step came echoing around a corner. These days, however, there was no one in his shadow.

His roommate, Ryoumei, was confused by the sudden gloom. He collapsed on his bed and sighed pointedly at Haruki who’d been sitting at the writing desk with a vacant look for almost twenty minutes.

‘You’re like a zoo animal that doesn’t move,’ Ryoumei informed him. ‘Someone’s going to poke you with a stick soon.’

No response. Not even that stupid grin of his.

Ryoumei was mostly worried because his best friend and roommate had always been gratingly cheerful. He was the kind to share the rice balls he’d snuck out of the cafeteria or laugh sincerely at jokes that weren’t all that funny.

From time to time, Ryoumei even remembered with a shock how poorly they’d all once treated a small kid by the name of Toono. For years, he’d been the loner and the butt of every prank. Ryoumei himself had played a hand in the mindless bullying. No one remembered how Haruki had gradually changed all that. He’d simply started asked Toono if he wanted to join them, whether they were playing handball or just eating lunch. His openness was so complete that no one could question or counter it without seeming petty by comparison. Now, Toono was as much a part of their group as anyone else.

Only Ryoumei remembered what Haruki had done. In fact, he was certain even Haruki himself was oblivious of his own good nature.

 _Airhead,_ he thought fondly.

‘What’s got you so mopey anyway?’ he said, scratching out his ear with a pencil. ‘You on your period?’

‘Have you seen Klaus-sama recently?’

Ryoumei groaned loudly. ‘Not again with that.’

‘Well, have you?’

‘Didn’t those other guys already try to beat you up for idolising him?’

‘I don’t give a crap what they think,’ Haruki mumbled, chin in hand.

‘And no, I haven’t seen him,’ Ryoumei quipped, a little irritated. ‘Why are you so worried about where he is?’

‘Don’t you think it’s strange? He’s usually always with Taki-sama but I haven’t seen him for over a month. Maybe something happened to him. Do you think I’d get in trouble if I asked Taki-sama himself?’

Ryoumei ogled him, pencil frozen in the air. ‘ _Ask_ Taki-sama? Where his Saxon pet has gone? Are you crazy?’

Haruki sighed. He thought about the gun that was wrapped in one of his shirts and stashed under his mattress. He wondered what Ryoumei would think of Haruki having kept it for so long.

Ryoumei stared at him for a few more moments before giving up.

‘When you’re done pining for your boyfriend, join us on the court. Kaoru’s mother sent him a basketball.’

‘I’m not pining!’

Ryoumei snorted. ‘Would have been smarter to say “he’s not my boyfriend”. Idiot.’

He was relieved to hear Haruki laugh for the first time.

‘Screw off, Ryou. You know what I meant.’

After he left, Haruki’s eyes fell again on the courtyard bench in the distance where a month ago he’d sat and heard about what it felt like to fly.

* * *

In Klaus’ dream, Taki was young. A teenager. Fourteen, fifteen at most. He was stunning. Klaus remembered his heart thudding painfully just at the sight of him. Slender and strong. Slanted, shining eyes beneath a shock of jet black hair. And pale skin begging to be marked.

But Klaus had been unable to move from his chair. Arms and legs petrified.

 _Doesn’t matter,_ Taki had said, unbuttoning his uniform. _Leave it to me_. Had his mouth said that or his eyes?

When he was naked, he straddled Klaus and slowly peeled his shirt away. Klaus thought he may faint from the overwhelming strength of Taki’s scent. Taki kissed him deeply, his mouth melting hotly against his. Klaus’ erection strained.

 _Where is it?_ Taki’s eyes/mouth said.

Where’s what?

_It? Where is it?_

Oh. Oh, it’s there. You just have to undo my… my…

To Klaus’ relief he seemed to understand. And then like magic, Klaus’ pants were gone. With a hand on Klaus’ shoulder, he lifted himself up and held Klaus’ cock in his slender hand. He lowered himself slowly and, as Klaus’ cock pushed in, a long exhale escaped his body. Klaus wanted badly to move his hands, to pinch his nipples hard and make him moan, touch his thumb to his lips, but his useless arms remained plastered to the armrests.

Young Taki sped up the pace and took Klaus deeper, from the tip all the way to the hilt.

 _Is this what you’ve wanted?_ Taki said, or sent, his eyes half-lidded with lust. _This whole time?_

What?

 _Please don’t be angry with me_ , he whispered, really whispered this time, into Klaus’ ear as he rode him. _I wish I could have given you all of this._

Taki kissed him again and Klaus felt himself come in terrible, bucking spasms deep inside his small body.

He thought back to the dream all day, even while he and his men skirted the enemy’s supply railway, laying explosives. He couldn’t shake the feeling of it, the pearly whiteness of Taki’s body. It felt more real than his real memories of Taki.

They lay the bombs over the course of a kilometre along Thermopylae, constantly stopping and starting each time they heard the rumble of a train. Once, they even retreated over five hundred metres towards the forest when they thought they spied a patrol in the distance.

By nightfall, all three hundred bombs were almost laid out. Ota and a few others were laying the finishing touches in the shadows of the rocky outcrop while Klaus’ unit stood watch.

For the past twenty minutes, Klaus had been uneasy. He felt like he’d memorised every detail of his surroundings and seen nothing out of the ordinary. And yet he had a bad feeling. It was like when something dark moves silently in an even greater darkness. There was something he wasn’t seeing.

The first shot took out the man on Ota’s immediate right.

Another dropped near Klaus.

Adrenaline flushing through him like ice water, he vaulted for the nearest cover behind a moss-covered rock. He yelled for everyone to do the same.

Thermopylae was a fateful name for their operation. Klaus quickly realised that an enemy patrol had snuck through a trail behind them in the mountains while their gazes were trained in the opposite direction. The shots came from behind and above.

Klaus gave the order to retreat.

His men were falling. Bullets sliced through the air, ricocheting off rock. They scrambled up the railway line, sprinting past explosives they’d spent hours meticulously laying down. Klaus felt everything slip through his fingers. They’d been so fucking close.

Driven by anger and anger alone, he turned and fired blindly into the side of the mountain as he sprinted, never knowing if he took out zero or twenty, never knowing if they were complete strangers or people with whom he’d caught the school bus back when he was a westerner and nothing more.

When the bullet tore through his left arm, his first thought was, _There. Finally._

And then his universe was reduced to that singular point of pain. He cried out and sank to the floor.

‘Captain!’

He heard Ota over the tumult. Gasping for breath, blinking through the pain, Klaus turned. Amazingly, Ota had remained among the bodies of his fellows to try to rig up the detonator.

‘Captain!’ he called again.

Feeling as though the weight of the entire world was skewed towards the hole in his arm, Klaus staggered to his feet. He headed for Ota, once even stumbling like an idiot over the railway planks. He kept his eyes on Ota’s outline hunkering at the end of the narrow stone passage. He expected, at any moment, to see a spurt of blood, Ota’s figure to shudder as though mildly surprised and then sink to the ground. But he seemed immune to bullets, his figure crouched and focused. His position was somewhat sheltered by the angle of the outcrop, but if there had been just a bit more light he would have been done for.

Klaus reached him and sank to the ground beside two dead men. Men who had been alive and breathing and even digesting two minutes before.

‘You’re hit,’ Ota said simply.

‘Yeah, saw that.’

‘Help me get this in the ground. Then pull that cord through.’

Klaus worked one-handed, his left arm searing. Flesh wound? Bone? Who cares. He was about to die soon anyway.

‘Fuck,’ Ota commented when a bullet came so close it left a black mark on the plunger in his hand. Klaus turned and fired at nothing. It was too dark.

‘What else do we need to do?’ he said.

‘Nothing. It’s set. It should blow.’

If all had gone to plan, they would have bolted into the clear, dragging the cord behind them, and exploded the bombs from a safe distance. No such luxury now.

Klaus’s vision reduced to a fine point in the darkness and bullet-riddled chaos in front of him. He almost felt calm. He felt strangely grateful for the Taki that had come to him in his last dream.

‘Good work,’ he said numbly to Ota, taking the plunger and box from him with his good hand. It was surprisingly heavy. ‘Now get out of here.’

‘What?’

‘Follow the others down the line. Stick to the south side, you’ll be right under them and they won’t be able to see you.’

For a precarious moment, Ota just watched him.

‘That’s an order, Lieutenant.’

Ota nodded a few times, wearing his usual scowl. Then he snatched the box and plunger back from Klaus and took off down the railway line.

‘ _Ota!_ ’

He got up to follow, bellowing as his arm oozed fresh blood. He couldn’t even hear Ota’s footsteps anymore. The guy’s turned into a fucking gazelle all of a sudden, Klaus thought. He had to catch up. He had to –

The explosions shook the world to its core. Where there was once pitch blackness, the night was swallowed in flame after flame that blew away the railway and the rocky outcrop, their Thermopylae. Metal and rock flew into space before collapsing.

Klaus felt the burning heat even from where he was. He saw the place where Ota would have been engulfed in fire. His last thought, before a huge, heavy, unyielding something fell and knocked him unconscious, was whether the wife and mistress would ever meet.

* * *

The news came through to the Fifteenth Armoured Division that night.

Railway supply line destroyed on the Eastern front.

Hostilities took place before detonation.

Back-up platoon reached their location after detonation, eliminated few remaining unfriendlies, salvaged survivors. Among them, Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt. Injured.

The word cut through Taki like glass.

They were being taken, on foot, to the nearest hospital on their side. It would take at least a day.

Injured. A useless word that captured a spectrum of meanings from a papercut to a lost limb.

He didn’t sleep.

* * *

But by the end of the following day, colour had returned to his face. The cadets saw the decisiveness of his step. Hasebe and Uemura were again racing to keep up during strategy meetings. Hans cast an appraising eye over his hair and clothes, the strength of his frame. And Taki himself barely had time to retreat into his room.

A single phone call from a hospital on the Eastern Front had brought him back.

_Master._

Taki played the conversation in his head again as he took a seat in the general meeting room.

_We did it._

To Taki’s humiliation, tears had pricked his eyes. He held them back with an inhuman effort. 

_We lost a lot of people. Really good guys. There's one especially I need to tell you about. But we did it._

He told Klaus it was a job well done.

_But apparently it’s not over yet, huh? That’s what they’re saying here anyway._

No. The Alliance were no longer able to bring any new supplies in but they were gearing up to give it their all with what they already had. The general room was abuzz with the new developments.

_Sounds like it'll be an epic last stand._

A low rumble of a chuckle.

_I guess it’s not as easy as I thought to win a war single-handedly._

Taki had wanted to impress upon Klaus the significance of what he’d done. Instead he’d asked, with bated breath, how he was.

_I’m fine. They’re fussing over nothing. Bullet got my left arm. It’s in a sling. And a rock crushed one or two of my left ribs. Whole left side of me is a bit useless at the moment, really. Got this big ugly brace thing. I’m wearing it well, though. All the nurses say so._

Relief. Anxiety. Guilt.

_I’ll be out of here soon. I’ll be next to you for that last stand. Wait for me, okay? Taki?_

Taki straightened in his chair and called the general meeting to order.

‘Okay. Let’s get started.’


	8. Back in Klaus' Little Shed

Suguri insisted on giving Klaus a thorough physical as soon as he returned to the compound. Klaus was rather chuffed at this and maintained an infuriating smile throughout the entire check-up.

‘Trying to find something the other docs didn’t, doc?’ He winced as Suguri’s cold hands gingerly felt his ribs. ‘Or did you just want an excuse to touch me?’

‘You’re lucky,’ said Suguri, having tuned him out completely.

From near the doorway, Taki looked up.

‘I don’t know how you keep getting out of these close scrapes,’ Suguri muttered almost to himself. He straightened and rolled his sleeves back down. ‘If the impact had been any closer to the centre of your body, your ribcage would have been completely crushed.’

‘Yeah, that’s what they said at the hospital,’ said Klaus carelessly. He thought about Lieutenant Shigeki Ota. He thought about sixteen out of fifty men who didn’t make it. Two crushed ribs was nothing. A bad joke. ‘So I can get out of this brace now, right?’

 _If there was ever a person whom the Gods would personally salvage from the direst of situations,_ Hans had said in his slow, measured way. _It would be Captain Wolfstadt._

In place of the relief he rationally knew he should be feeling, Taki was beginning to nurse a very specific form of anxiety. Surely, after this incident at the very least, Klaus had used up all his divine favour.

Suguri hesitated.

‘You… you should be able to move without it. But I wouldn’t recommend it for another –’

‘Thank God.’

Using his good hand, Klaus undid the latch on the metal brace wrapped around his torso. It creaked open and Klaus tried to wedge it out from beneath the sling encasing his left arm. Suguri reluctantly helped.

‘The sling can come off soon too, right?’

‘Absolutely not. The bullet fractured the bone. It’ll be out of commission for another few weeks at least.’

‘You’re no fun, doc.’

‘And in fact, I’d recommend that you come back every few days so I can check it’s healing properly.’

Klaus raised his eyebrows. Suguri was as serious as ever and his face gave nothing away.

It seemed like a fairly standard request from an army doctor and yet Klaus couldn’t help reading volumes into it. Had something changed in the way Suguri saw him? If anything, after he and Taki had been caught in that damning situation in Taki’s bedroom, Klaus expected only fresh waves of coldness from the guy. The newfound concern, brusque and cold though it seemed, was unexpected. Almost nice.

‘Really, now, I’m starting to think you’re coming onto me.’

Suguri’s face didn’t budge.

‘Not everything is a joke, Captain.’

Words that were immediately undermined by Klaus’ throaty chuckle. 

‘Can he fight?’

Both Klaus and Suguri turned to Taki, who was staring at the floor near Klaus’ feet.

‘Not for a while, Taki-sama,’ Suguri replied.

Klaus started. ‘Now, hang on a minute –’

‘He can move about. Barely. But getting on a bike, actually engaging in combat… that’s out of the question.’

‘I don’t –’

‘Any more pressure on his body and he may end up bedridden for who knows how long.’

‘Okay, wait,’ Klaus interjected again, trying hard to backpedal. He recognised the look on Taki’s face. ‘I know how it looks. But it's not as bad as all that. One hand's all I need to ride my bike. And I just need my teeth to pull the pin from grenades. Hell, that’s how I did it even when I had both hands.’

Taki looked entirely unconvinced.

Suguri tried again. ‘You’ll be in too much pain to effectively take part in any strenuous –’

‘Oh, come on, you can give me some of the good stuff for the pain, right?’

Klaus realised his mistake as soon as he spoke. There was a dark flash of eyes from the doorway.

‘I… Taki, I didn’t mean –‘

‘Regenwalde has asked to see us,’ Taki interrupted, his voice cold. ‘He insisted that we both be there. We ought to go now, if you’re feeling up to it.’

Klaus made one or two more sounds before giving up.

‘Sure. Whatever.’

He got to his feet with barely a wince. He even stretched and arched his back a little. Showing off, Suguri thought with tired disdain. He handed Klaus his shirt without a word.

Taki looked away as Klaus pulled it on. He’d seen beyond the bruises, he realised with a guilty flush. He’d seen the strength of his core. The skin and muscles. He’d felt an unmistakable wave of something. Something very close to desire. Something to be expelled as soon as it reared, like the first spots of mould.

He walked out of the office.

Unaware of this private battle, Klaus threw his coat on one-handed and followed.

Taki stopped so suddenly Klaus nearly ran into him.

‘Second-lieutenant Suguri,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘If Klaus comes to you for morphine or any other painkillers, you will need my express approval before administering it.’

Suguri was somewhat taken aback by the unusual order. When no explanation seemed imminent, he nodded.

There was only one thing Suguri had managed to understand after everything he'd seen; as long as Klaus von Wolfstadt was alive and well, Taki would be too.

‘Yes, sir.’

* * *

It was a familiar sight to behold; the young commander strolling across the compound with his knight in tow. Even those whose mistrust of the foreigner had not abated felt somewhat more at ease, though they couldn’t explain it to themselves if they tried. 

Enough days had passed that Klaus only felt minimal pain in his left side when he walked. Ribs were a piece of cake. His arm, though. His arm sometimes kept him up at night. No need for the young master to know that.

He kept his right hand in his pocket and his eyes on the back of Taki’s head.

‘Was that really necessary?’

A short pause.

‘Yes,’ was Taki's curt reply.

‘I missed you.’

A hot flare of surprise and embarrassment. Taki battened it down as best as he could. How was it that Klaus could still catch him off guard after all this time?

They didn’t speak again for minutes.

The midday sun struggled to make any impression under the new chill of autumn. The world seemed poised, Taki thought. Ready for the final struggle. Even the birds seemed to warn them of it as they darted about the sky in little groups.

When they reached a junction, Klaus automatically turned towards the holding cells and was surprised to see Taki heading the other way.

‘I thought we were seeing Regenwalde?’

‘He’s been moved. I can’t vouch for the safety of the cells anymore since he was shot.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the main building. Second storey.’

Klaus frowned. ‘He’s in your building?’

‘Yes. Under guards that I’ve personally appointed.’

‘So he’s upgraded from prison to the goddamn presidential suite? How’d he swing that?’

‘Hans didn’t ask for anything. In fact, he was happy to remain in the cell. I insisted.’

 _Hans_ , _is it?_ Klaus thought with a surge of jealousy he didn’t even bother to fight. _I was gone a month and already we're out with the first names._

‘When do I get upgraded?’ He tried to keep his tone playful. Mask jealousy with jealousy, he thought.

He caught a glimpse of Taki's eyes in profile.

‘Are you not happy with your accommodation?’

Klaus sighed dramatically. ‘I like my shed just fine. It’s just such a long walk to your room and back in the middle of the night.’

He was quite satisfied with the redness that touched Taki’s ears.

* * *

He was also satisfied to see that Hans’ presidential suite was actually a glorified closet. In fact, he was almost sure it was simply a large walk-in that had been revamped as a cell.

One of the two guards flanking the door let them through and closed the door after them. Hans Regenwalde was seated by a small desk on which maps and charts were spread. He glanced up.

In addition to the desk, there was only a thin, well-made bed. The room was small, whitewashed and bare. Its only redeeming feature was a single window, narrow but tall, that overlooked the western side of the compound and the tree-rimmed slopes beyond.

 _A better view_ , was what Taki had thought before he ordered for that specific walk-in to be refitted. He didn’t know why he had been so compelled by something Hans had said in passing. Given Klaus’ reaction to the situation in general, he was glad no one would ever be the wiser.

‘Klaus,’ said Hans evenly. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Klaus couldn’t return the gesture with any degree of honesty so he remained silent. Taki picked up on it. The atmosphere couldn’t be more different from the one they’d just left in Suguri’s office.

The bandage around Hans’ head had been removed. Clear grey eyes observed them from beneath the russet fringe. His hair was thick and short in a way that set off his thin, Roman features. Even in his colourless prison attire, he managed to exude a certain wellness. Strength. Klaus was suddenly very conscious of his sling.

Hans turned fully in his chair to face them.

‘I was just telling Taki that it was -’

‘That’s Taki- _sama_ to you,’ Klaus interrupted.

There was a short, disbelieving silence. Taki looked at Klaus, wondering if he’d heard right. It was like Hasebe had momentarily stepped into Klaus’ body. If Taki had been in any way inclined, he might have let slip an incredulous smile.

‘Of course,’ said Hans slowly, who was under no similar restraint. His smile, though, was entirely without mirth. ‘My apologies. I was just telling Taki-sama that it was most unfortunate for one of his foreigners to come out of the medical wing just in time for another to go in. So it’s great to see you’ve made a speedy recovery.’

_One of Taki’s foreigners? Arrogant piece of –_

Taki noticed the balled fist at Klaus’ side and swiftly said, ‘You asked to see us?’

Hans, smile still lingering, turned to the charts.

‘Yes.’

Taki felt a spur of hope. ‘Have you worked out something about the Alliance attack?’

At that, Hans hesitated, which was a rare sight.

‘Yes and no.’

He moved a long hand to the topmost chart almost absentmindedly. Taki waited with bated breath. Klaus almost rolled his eyes.

‘I think I know how to help you win this last battle,’ he said quietly. ‘At least, I _can_ know.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘From the reports and intelligence you’ve given me -’ (Klaus tensed. How much had Taki trusted this guy?) ‘- I’m almost certain I know the commander who will be leading the offensive. Ruttgenstein. He’s notorious. The Alliance will want someone like that for their last stand.’

From beneath the charts, he slid out a few of his own neat notes written in pencil. With a small jolt, Klaus recognised that agonisingly precise script from his school days.

After meeting both their gazes for long enough to give them adequate warning, Hans stood up slowly and moved aside, indicating that Taki have a look. Klaus tried to keep still as Taki approached him. There’s a window right there, he reminded himself. A tall window for the tall bastard. One false move and he’ll have all the fresh air he wants.

As they talked strategy over the small desk, Klaus found himself wondering why Hans had even wanted him there in the first place.

‘I worked directly under Ruttgenstein for a time. He has three main strategies and he uses one of the three without fail in every one of his campaigns because they’ve always worked.’

‘How do you know which one he’ll use?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll need to see him drop a few hints early on. The angle of attack. The choice of deployment. Numbers in the front line offensives.’

‘But… but we can’t know that until he attacks.’

‘I know.’

Klaus felt his skin prickle. He suddenly wanted Taki to step away from the desk.

As though reading his mind, Hans moved away from Taki towards the window. He threw a dispassionate gaze over the compound and turned back to them. It’s like he thinks he’s on stage, Klaus thought derisively, his guard still very much up. He wondered what had happened to the shy kid who'd been beaten up by the soccer field.

‘I need to be on the front lines to see it,’ said Hans.

 _Yeah, right,_ thought Klaus.

 _Absolutely not,_ thought Taki.

‘I know what you’re both thinking.’ Hans held his hands behind his back. ‘And I know the full import of what I’m asking. So I won’t sugar-coat it.’

Again, for a moment, he appeared hesitant.

‘You know, it seems outlandish,’ he said, his voice suddenly introspective. ‘But in reality… it’s quite simple.’

The words, the way he spoke them, suddenly sparked a memory in both Taki and Klaus.

He kept speaking. Slowly and deliberately.

‘Take me with you –’

‘No,’ said Klaus before he could stop himself.

Hans flicked his eyes from Klaus back to Taki.

‘You just have to make me –’

‘Shut up, right now.’ Something awful had started to bubble up in Klaus. Something angry. Desperate.

‘Klaus…’

But Taki was unnerved as well. He didn’t know which of them to look at.

 _Take me with you_ , Klaus had said, his hair flattened by the rain. _It’s simple. You just have to make me yours._ The train had waited beside them for Taki to make the decision that changed both their lives.

The tiny room managed to hold a ringing silence that was heavier than itself.

‘Taki,’ said Hans, eyes now unmovingly on the commander. ‘Taki-sama. I wanted you both to be here to hear my request. It only seemed fitting to ask you in the presence of the one whom you consider to be your current knight.’

‘Hans, shut your fucking mouth.’ He wanted to leap over the bed that was in his way and hold Hans up by the scruff of his neck. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not at all prone to emotional actions or gestures,’ said Hans, his coolness providing a stark counterpoint to Klaus’ building rage. ‘You and I are quite alike in that way. So I hope you understand how much it means when I say, Commander, that I truly feel I can follow you to the ends of the Earth.’

‘Hans, I swear to God…’ Klaus took a few steps forward, ribs shooting in pain from the abrupt movement. Taki instinctively held out a hand to stop him.

‘I didn’t even know such a… a sentiment… a feeling, I suppose, was possible,’ said Hans, faltering again in a way that was completely out of character. Taki was at a loss. Hans’ face and posture were still composed, as were the words themselves, but there was a breadth of emotion there that he was apparently struggling to contain. Emotion that occasionally leaked through. ‘Until I heard about Klaus’ defection. What he did for you. And after I started learning about you, you’ve been the only thing on my mind. Even more so after we met in person.’

Taki, wide-eyed, felt the heat rise to his face. Klaus, thankfully, was too busy glaring at Hans to notice. He appeared almost too stunned to move.

Hans took advantage of the lull to continue.

‘I don’t know how, but it appears to have slipped past the attention of everyone, including your own country. But I can see it. You and everything you stand for. You’re the beacon of hope for our nations. For peace.’

Taki noticed in a way that was both peripheral and strangely focused that the trees beyond the window were evenly divided between those which were turning brown and those that held onto summer’s green. How, he wondered, do the trees decide when to turn?

‘With both of us behind you,’ Hans said, his voice returning now to its careful, determined pitch. ‘With both myself and Klaus by your side… you can win the war for your people.’

He hadn’t said the words. Not exactly. But he didn’t need to. Klaus suddenly remembered that he’d wanted to slam the bastard up against the wall, hard enough to give him another concussion.

Taki, however, was quick off the mark. He barred the space between the desk and the bed so Klaus would have to forcibly push him out of the way to get past. It was like stopping a coursing river at a bottleneck, Taki thought.

He could feel Hans’ gaze on his back as he tried to steady Klaus.

‘Stand down,’ he ordered as firmly as he could.

‘Taki –’

‘Let me handle it.’

Klaus looked at him for what felt like the first time. It always took him a moment, he realised, to remember he was standing beside Taki Reizen. The commander had been winning battles since long before he’d arrived on the scene. He willed his pulse to settle.

Still holding up a hand before Klaus, Taki turned to look at Hans. The gaze was returned almost as coolly as ever, with only the smallest hint of self-consciousness.

Taki struggled to filter through the myriad of questions.

‘Why?’ he said finally. ‘Why are you offering yourself like this?’

Another ephemeral glance at Klaus. _Did you ask him that question when he did the same?_ Taki could almost hear the words and prayed he wouldn’t ask.

He didn’t.

‘It’s exactly as I’ve told you before, Commander. I envy Klaus, I envy the purpose he found, more than I can say. I’ve spent my whole life without one and I think I found it. In you. It sounds suspicious and sudden, I’m sure, but –‘

‘I’m not kidding, Hans,’ warned Klaus in a low, shaking voice. ‘If you don’t shut up, I will vault over this bed and kill you where you stand.’

The threat hung in the air like a separate being.

‘I found something I believe in,’ Hans finished smoothly, without a trace of fear in his voice. He directed his final remark at Taki alone.

* * *

Animal imagery again. Klaus’ mind was filled with it. He was the uncontrollable dog, frothing at the mouth and livid, and Taki was the small black cat and Hans was the glittering snake slithering around its paws. Every instinct in him had told him to kill the snake. At least hurt it. Remind it that it had no place here. That its place was far away. Far in the past.

And instead, still frothing at the mouth and livid, he’d obediently followed Taki out of that glorified closet and out of the building.

He’d never felt it before. This trembling anger. Streaked through with red-hot jealousy. Not even when bullets glanced off the wall near Taki’s head did he feel so powerless. How the fuck… How the blue, blinding fuck had Hans known to say those words? Almost those exact words... 

Taki's head was swimming in them too.  _Take me with you_. _It’s simple. You just have to make me-_ With a start, he realised he couldn’t be sure anymore if he was hearing Hans’ words or Klaus’.

_You just have to make me yours._

There. That voice definitely belonged to Klaus.

Taki turned. The look on Klaus' face was strange. Somewhat frightening. It made his heart pound.

Origami, Klaus thought. When he’d first noticed Hans Regenwalde, the guy had been folding origami under the table. How the hell had it come to this?

He suddenly felt lightheaded. The sensation nearly made him laugh.

‘Klaus?’

Taki had stopped. His voice brought him back. A little. The lightheadedness was less light than he’d initially thought.

‘I…’

‘Are you okay? What’s wrong?’

A throbbing, coursing pain suddenly radiated from the wound in his arm. It had been trying to attract his attention for a while, Klaus realised, but he’d ignored it. And so it had borrowed some blood from his brain to try to fix itself. Right. Caught up now.

‘I’m fine.’

‘No, you’re not. We’re going to the infirmary.’

‘Just so Suguri can feel me up again? I’ll pass.’

‘Klaus –’

‘I’ll just…’ He took a deep breath, his head careening a bit, and tried to gather his bearings. The courtyard was nearby. So his room was too. ‘I’ll just take a quick nap. Won't be long.' He smiled thinly. 'Don’t go… don’t go making anyone else your knight while I’m sleeping, though. Okay?’

Taki’s heart hammered again. It was typical enough for Klaus to make light of the situation but his words managed to cut them both. Everything had taken on a surreal, disquieting shade.

He walked with Klaus through the courtyard.

* * *

Taki had hesitated before sliding the needle into Klaus’ shoulder. But the shuddering exhales had worried him, as had the sweat that started to stand out more prominently on Klaus’ face. And so, after Klaus pointed at a discreet cube-like bag in the corner, Taki wordlessly retrieved one of the last few remaining vials and set up the syringe.

In the end, he was more relieved than guilty when Klaus settled back against the bedhead with a happy sigh.

As the sweet liquid relief flooded his veins, Klaus opened an eye. Taki had pulled a chair by the bed and was watching him closely. A view Klaus could get used to.

‘You’re not,’ he said blearily, trying to piece an important thought together. ‘You’re not going to, are you?’

‘To what?’

‘Do what he asked.’

Taki put the syringe on the bedside table. His palms, he realised, had been sweating.

‘Of course not.’

But even as he said it, he felt a squirm of guilt.

With a feeling like a sheet of ice breaking off and sliding into the ocean, he was beginning to see that he would need Hans' help. Especially with Klaus out of action in the immediate future.

_‘We can defeat Ruttgenstein if we know which strategy he’ll use. He’s never had someone fight against him who knows him so well. It’ll be like defusing a live bomb.’_

That was what mattered. Strategy. Planning. Winning. Everything else… things about knighthood and pledges and purpose. None of that mattered; certainly not as much as winning.

None of that mattered.

He stared at Klaus’ sling. Klaus’ huge body stretched out on the bed. Klaus’ eyelids lowering.

A familiar, dangerous feeling. He wiped his palms on his coat.

‘I’ll let you sleep.’

He’d barely risen from the chair when he felt Klaus’ eyes on him. There was an unfamiliar look in them that made Taki freeze. He almost held his breath.

‘Did anything happen?’ Klaus asked out of nowhere. His tone had a new, strange edge to it Taki hadn't heard before.

‘What?’

‘Did Hans try anything? While I was gone?’

‘What… what do you mean _try_ anything?’ But Taki knew what he meant. He averted his eyes and instantly gave himself away.

Klaus felt something seize him by the windpipe. He sat up far too quickly.

‘I’ll kill him.’

‘No –’ Taki sighed in exasperation, that sense of unreality descending again. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course he didn’t.’

Klaus searched his face through the morphine haze. He was telling the truth.

‘What makes you think he would?’ asked Taki suddenly with a frown.

The light swung on Klaus and he closed his eyes. A slight grimace.

‘He’s a snake.’

The tone, the words. Again, all unfamiliar.

A small impasse followed. Klaus sat on the edge of his bed and Taki stood over him, his mouth set in a hard line, mind running over the unsettling, staccato rhythm of their dialogue, wondering what on Earth was going on.

Then Klaus glanced up. His face was familiar again. Heavy jaw. Devilish eyes. A crooked grin.

‘Didn’t you say you were leaving?’

Taki knew that smirk. Entirely unexpectedly, he felt a rush of relief. Comfort, almost. Then Klaus pulled him forward.

* * *

‘You said yes,’ Klaus said into his neck, breathing him in. He could never get used to that unreal scent. ‘Last time. Before Suguri caught us.’ 

Taki needed a few seconds to notice his hands were instinctively trying to push Klaus away. Then he felt lips on his neck. Stubble. Teeth. He shivered and Klaus pulled him closer, pressing him between his legs.

‘Can I assume the yes is still valid?’ Hearing his own words, Klaus chuckled. ‘I don’t think I would have made much of a lawyer.’

He didn’t expect the slender hand on the back of his neck, the fingers grasping just a little.

‘Klaus…’

It was Klaus' turn to hold his breath.

 _I missed you_ , he had said so casually and with so much meaning.

When Klaus pulled back to look at him, Taki felt overwhelmed again. How could he possibly reply in any way that was fitting? In a way that could do justice to the billowing slate cloud that surrounded him during the month of Klaus’ absence? That would still allow something of Taki to remain even after he said it, so everything he had promised to his people and his country would be intact?

‘I’m… I’m glad you’re safe,’ he said eventually, frustrated at the stiffness and smallness of his own voice. ‘And that you came back.’

Klaus blinked. Taki’s cheeks were flushed. Eyes somewhere on Klaus’ right shoulder.

He kissed him then, one large hand holding Taki’s face, the other being squeezed between them in the sling. Glittering, slithering snakes suddenly seemed like a vague memory.

Klaus kissed Taki’s top lip then his bottom one, pulling gently with his teeth, thrusting his tongue back into his mouth. Taki’s breathing became steadily more laboured and the hand on his neck was tighter. He wondered if that was Taki’s cock pressing through both their clothes. He knew his was already pushing against the front of his pants, aching for release. The pain and the morphine and Taki’s scent were almost too much. He pulled back, head reeling again.

‘I don’t know how you do this to me,’ he murmured. ‘Every time. I always come so close to losing my mind.’

Taki took in an unsteady breath and looked down at him quizzically. He wondered if it was the morphine talking.

* * *

Klaus watched, dazed, as Taki helped take his coat off. He’d struggled one handed with the buttons and so Taki, with such obvious hesitation that Klaus could almost hear his mind whirring, had reached up to help. The coat fell to the floor.

He pulled Taki onto his lap and rolled them over onto the bed. There, his one-handedness continued to beguile him.

‘Of all times to go and get shot in the arm.’

Taki watched, lips parted, eyelids heavy, as Klaus pulled off all his clothes. When Taki was naked, he ran his right hand slowly up Taki’s thigh, the edge of his thumb brushing his stiff cock, up his abdomen and chest. Warm, huge and calloused.

The hand was gone and Klaus hovered above him, trying to unclasp his own belt. Again, with hesitation written into his every move, Taki took the buckle and strap in both his hands and undid it slowly.

Their eyes met. Breathing heavily, Taki blushed.

‘Taki,’ Klaus groaned. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I won’t be able to control a damn thing I do.’

On the last word, he grasped Taki’s cock. Smothered Taki’s cry with a kiss.

Time came to Taki erratically. In bursts. In long-drawn moments when Klaus bent low to suck his cock. In frenzied surges as his climax built. And then it, time that is, ceased to exist completely when he came.

He opened his eyes, almost certain he could hear echoes of his own moans, and then felt Klaus’s fingers near his hole. He gasped sharply.

Klaus worked carefully and pushed Taki’s semen from his mouth in a few gentle bursts. Taki’s back arched, his eyes bulging at the sensation.

‘Can you feel that? That’s your own come inside you.’ Klaus slipped in two fingers, revelling in the heat and pressure, massaging him deeply. He straightened and took in the sight of Taki’s clenched fists and mussed hair. He exhaled and tried to rein himself back.

‘We’re going to do it right this time.’

* * *

Again, time and space were warped. There was only Klaus. His voice and his hand.

‘That’s three fingers now.’ His words came in deep, reverberating waves, enough to send Taki close to the edge a second time. ‘I could fit my whole fist in here.’

‘Don’t!’ Taki gasped suddenly.

Klaus chuckled. ‘I had something better in mind.’

He crawled forwards, cursing his sling, and pulled Taki’s legs around his hips. His cock rubbed back and forth over Taki’s hole. Taki shivered again and held his breath. Klaus prayed to old gods and new that no one would knock on the door.

* * *

Not long afterwards, Taki’s head and body were suddenly full to bursting. He held onto Klaus’ shoulders, his moans taking on a life of their own. Above him, Klaus braced himself, head hung low enough that his forehead touched the bed.

Inside Taki at long last, he was now trying his absolute damndest not to move.

 _Two minutes_ , he told himself. To help, he summoned visions from last time. The blood and stifled sobs and unconsciousness. Here they were now, back in Klaus’ little shed, and he was going to do right. _Two fucking minutes. You can do that much, Wolfstadt. Pull it together._

‘Amazing,’ he grunted, his voice sounding tortured. ‘That pulsing and squeezing you’re doing. That might be enough to make me come. Are you doing it on purpose?’

Taki squirmed. Panted.

‘Klaus..!’

There was a subtle yet definitive movement of Taki’s hips. Upwards. Almost as though… But Klaus reined himself in again.

‘Not yet,’ he said, hardly daring to believe it. ‘A little longer, okay?’

Finally, after he felt sure the two minutes were up, Klaus pulled out excruciatingly slowly. About halfway.

Taki braced and squeezed his eyes shut.

‘Look at me,’ Klaus said.

As soon as Taki’s eyes opened, he barrelled in. Taki’s breath left his body.

* * *

After a few shallow thrusts, Klaus used the entire length of his cock, plunging deep. He tried to angle it so he could hit Taki’s sweet spot, drinking in the steady, desperate moans coming from beneath him. Since no one had knocked on the door, he now prayed that he wouldn’t wake up.

Less than a minute since he started moving, Taki turned his head mutely to the side, flushed and shivering. Klaus felt a surge of anxiety, wondering whether he was going to see a repeat of last time. Then he realised.

‘You came again? Already?’

It was a line Klaus kept on standby in order to tease and humiliate. Now he was genuinely shocked. He hadn't even touched Taki’s cock. He felt Taki’s climax pulsing, milking his cock in the tightest grip imaginable.

Growling, he sucked at Taki’s collarbone hard enough to leave a mark and make him whimper.

‘I wanted to fuck you for hours, but at this rate…’

He kissed him again, paced himself with another few short jabs and let himself get pulled into Taki’s stare, one that was both focused on him and misted over with lust. His hair was drenched in sweat, plastered over his right eye and Klaus’ pillow.

What remaining control Klaus had was thrown to the winds. He flipped Taki over and started hammering.

Taki yelled out his name in a strangled cry.

Since no one had knocked on the door and he hadn’t been woken up, Klaus now prayed that Taki wouldn’t say the word that would end it all. He drove himself into Taki’s small, pale body, feeling it give way.

‘Feels good doesn't it?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Being fucked hard?’

‘Ugh, Klaus! Ah!’

Between thrusts: ‘I wonder… if there’ll ever come a day… when you admit that.’

To his delight, he felt the familiar tightening and shivering as Taki clenched the sheets.

That was when he heard it.

‘No…’

Klaus panted and fought hard with himself. He almost slowed down. Was he really capable of stopping now?

Then he heard Taki say to himself, almost in despair, ‘Not again.’

With a relieved grin, Klaus reached for Taki's cock.

‘It's okay, Taki. Come for me again. Come hard.’

Taki saw the blanket beneath him become dotted by his own tears. The only thing he knew was that they were not tears of pain. There was simply no room for anything in his body anymore; not breath or tears or come. He was completely filled with Klaus.

His ass suddenly clamped down so tight it was almost painful for Klaus. Taki gasped and bucked beneath him. And then Klaus couldn't hold back.

‘Shit, I'm going to come. I'm going to fill you up, Taki.’

He pulled Taki's hair back roughly and thrust so deep he could swear he hit a wall. At the very last moment, a glittering black snake flashed across his mind. He imagined, not for the first time, Hans driving his cock into Taki.

Taki felt him gush. He finally felt the pain.

He also heard, right before Klaus came, the words squeezed out in a ragged whisper by his ear. ‘You’re mine. Be only mine.’

* * *

Taki collapsed onto his stomach, curling away from his own mess on the blanket.

Klaus lay on his back, his mind filled now with pain, morphine and utter bliss. It had been the best sex of his life.

He wondered whether delayed gratification had anything to do with it. Simple, he thought. Hold back for a full year and a half. Intersperse with a few disastrous incidents that are far beyond borderline rape. Prove your loyalty by nearly dying a handful of times. Then you're good to go.

He finally looked down at Taki's face. Tears still hung around the corners of his eyes. His beautiful pale body was contorted and spent. Klaus felt a tingle in his deflating cock. He wanted to hold him. With no agenda whatsoever; just for the closeness.

‘We made a real mess of the sheets,' he said. 'We should get under them.’

 _Real smooth,_ he thought.

But Taki wearily lifted himself and Klaus, sending a last word of thanks to gods old and new, slipped the blanket over them.

After he pulled Taki against his chest, again surprised at the lack of resistance, Klaus let his hand travel over Taki's hip. He touched the firm flesh of his ass and slipped the tip of his finger into him.

‘That's both you and me in there.’

Humiliation. Like a sliver of glass.

‘Don’t.’

They both heard the familiar tone.

Klaus felt abashed. Then grateful that it was the first time he'd heard it.

Pressed close against him, Taki ached. Parts of him still pulsed. He felt the strange sensation like he was staggering his way down a steep incline, worried about hitting the ground. He breathed in the scent of Klaus’ skin and sweat and felt it all immediately in Klaus’ one touch. The shame of it. The uncleanliness. He tried to get up but Klaus, without even trying to catch his eye, pulled him back.

‘Just a few more minutes, okay? Please?’

* * *

As sleep crept over Klaus, his breath gently disturbing the top of Taki's hair, snippets of thoughts chased one another in his mind, each unfinished.

_It felt good, didn't it? I know it did. I could feel it did. So why don't you admit –_

_This is what sex is supposed to be like. Not last time. I'm so sorry for what happened last –_

_This is what sex is supposed to be like. It's not wrong or immoral or dirty. If we both –_

_We love each other. I know you can never say it but I know… at least, I think –_

_I love you. I love you so much it physically hurts and then it makes me want to hurt you to show you how much –_

And then a thought came to him fully formed.

 _I don't pretend to empathise. But I've thought about it and I think I understand. What's holding you back. This place. This uniform. Your duty. Your family. They’ve all told you to fear this._   _But this is good._

_This is love._

_Please love me._


	9. Words Like Trust

That was it. It didn’t sound too bad. Not great, but not bad. Klaus brought himself back from the brink of sleep, opened his eyes a fraction and lifted his chin off Taki’s hair.

‘Taki?’

No reply. Just the gentle rising and falling of his chest.

Almost relieved, Klaus closed his eyes again. He took the opportunity to filter Taki’s hair between his fingers. Like strands of silk.

The afternoon sunlight still poured into the shed. Klaus mused. Here were two grown men, commander and captain no less, falling asleep in the middle of the day on the eve of a landmark battle that would determine the fate of nations.

Probably for the best, he decided. The words, those words, almost definitely sounded better in his head than they would aloud.

* * *

When Taki awoke a few hours later, he was alone in the shed.

He sat up, feeling sore in more than one place but altogether alright. The sun was still up and he tried to gauge the time. Mid-afternoon. Not too late to oversee last-minute pre-combat organisation. Still, it was a stupid move to have fallen asleep. If the reports were accurate, Ruttgenstein was just around the corner. Some commander Taki would make if his division was blasted from the face of the Earth by a surprise air raid while he slept soundly in his captain’s room.

But try as he might, he couldn’t ignore the fact that he had, in fact, slept soundly. He remembered everything that had happened not long ago with a surreal, self-conscious flush. 

Heavy footsteps sounded from outside. Klaus swung the door open. His eyes fell on Taki.

‘Hey,’ he said, lifting a corner of his mouth.

Taki’s heart pounded for absolutely no reason.

‘Sorry. Had to run to the infirmary and back.’

It took a few bleary seconds for Taki to even remember why Klaus’ arm was in a sling. Then he sat up straighter.

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine. Just felt like replacing the sling.’ _Woke up in pain like you wouldn’t believe, saw part of the bandage soaked through with blood, masterfully avoided Suguri’s questions about what I’d done to aggravate the wound, made him promise not to tell you._ ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Doubtful eyes watched as Klaus closed the door, sealing them both in the pleasant, dim light of the shed.

‘What time is it?’ asked Taki.

‘Nearly three.’

‘I have a meeting with the Fourteenth Division commander at four.’

Hans will be there, Taki remembered. This he didn’t say out loud. He reached for his clothes.

Klaus, meanwhile, was kicking himself. He’d wanted to slip back into bed before Taki awoke. Now he felt like he'd lost a moment. The words he’d come up with in the hazy limbo before sleep swirled around in his head like racehorses anxious to be released.

_Taki, listen. I’ve thought about it and…_

No.

No, he shouldn’t say it. Of course he shouldn’t fucking say it.

He sat on the edge of the bed, fondly observing Taki’s ruffled hair and the white skin that was fast disappearing under the shirt. Before he buttoned up fully, Klaus caught a glimpse of the mark he’d left on Taki’s collarbone. He remembered how Taki had shuddered and convulsed around his cock right before Klaus bent low to suck his skin. Had that really only happened a few hours ago?

Before his thoughts went rogue, he reluctantly turned his head. The jade coat lay in a rumpled heap on the floor by the bed. He picked it up.

The room, he thought, smelled of flowers. He’d first noticed when he stepped back inside.

Taki was on his feet and dressing swiftly. After he buttoned his cuffs and ran a hand through his hair in a game attempt to straighten it, Klaus stood and held his coat up for him. Their eyes met once before Taki automatically turned and let Klaus slip the coat onto his shoulders, something he did quite fluidly even with one hand.

Having turned, Taki’s eyes fell on a small pile of hardcover books on Klaus’ desk in the corner; apparently the only ones that had survived the onslaught when Hasebe ordered his room stripped and searched (what now felt like years ago). Taki wondered what sort of books they were. And how Hans had known that a book had saved Klaus’ life.

And then, out of nowhere, he was reliving how Klaus felt inside him. The heat. The relentlessness. The overwhelming power of his body. The disbelief, not for the first time, over Klaus’ size. The grin that was like an anchor to which he clung when he was lost in a feeling he’d never believed possible. At least not for him.

When his coat was on, Taki pulled it closed and started to button it down, furious at his mental lapse. Behind him, Klaus showed no sign of moving away. Taki’s pulse picked up again. The absurd thought occurred to him that Klaus had read his mind.

A large hand slid from his shoulder to his waist.

Taki’s skin tingled. He expected, at any moment, to feel lips on the side of his neck.

His mind replayed something Klaus had mumbled a few hours ago. _I don’t know how you do this to me. Every time. I always come so close to losing my mind._ Morphine-induced or not, Taki was struck by how much the words had echoed his own thoughts. Knowing that it was Klaus standing behind him, that it was his hand pressing gently through layers of clothing, was enough for fog to leak into the corners of his mind.

 _Please don’t,_ he sent silently. _Not now. I can’t remember how to say no to you._

He didn’t expect to feel Klaus’ forehead thunk down, almost audibly, on the back of his head. It was a jarring, unwieldy sort of contact and Taki could only think to stay still. He was relieved to hear Klaus chuckle.

‘You smell so good.’

They only stood there for another second or two before Klaus lifted his head. The hand was gone.

Taki fastened the last button and walked past Klaus towards the door. The offending hand now safely stowed in his pocket, Klaus let out a steady breath and turned to follow.

He should have fucking said it.

* * *

Taki braced himself before he told Klaus not to come to the meeting.

‘Why the hell not?’

‘You won’t be coming on the mission. There’s no point.’

Klaus fumed. He’d hoped Taki had somehow forgotten Suguri’s advice. _Like hell I'm not going on the final mission._ (Yet another thing he didn't plan on telling the young master.)

‘I still want to know what’s going to be happening out there,’ he said instead.

‘I don’t want you to know,’ Taki said quietly.

The footsteps behind him stopped. Taki turned.

‘Why the hell not?’ Klaus said again in a different tone.

The thundering sound of feet filled the silence between them for a while. A large platoon of soldiers came jogging around the corner, their thick-chested drill sergeant shouting orders from the front. So disciplined were they that not a single one turned to look at either Taki or Klaus.

Behind them loomed the building in which all the officers were gathering to go over final strategy. An autumn wind had swept clouds across the face of the sun and coloured the world differently. There was the distant threat of rain.

‘I don’t trust you,’ Taki said, when the sound of the platoon drifted off.

Klaus’ heart skipped a beat.

‘What?’

‘I don’t trust you not to follow us. If you know where we’re going and what we’re doing, you’ll disobey me again and you’ll try to join the fight. And you’ll get hurt. Or worse.’

The clarification was somewhat of a relief but Taki’s first words had left quite an impact. Especially because, in this case, Taki’s prediction was right on the money; that was exactly what Klaus had been planning to do.

‘I _came_ here to join you in the fight,’ he reminded him. ‘And fighting means running the risk of getting hurt, or worse.’

‘You’re injured. You can’t fight like you normally do. Meaning if you come with us tomorrow, you’ll be an easy target. And a burden.’

Taki had lined up the words quietly in his mind after they left the shed. Words like _trust_ and _burden_. He knew he’d have to pull out the big guns to stop Klaus from following him into the fire.

‘That’s not –’

‘If you disobey me this time,’ said Taki, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I will never be able to trust you again.’

Klaus watched him, feeling helpless. In that moment, Taki was like a steel wall.

When Taki next spoke, his tone was considerably softer.

‘Go back. Get some rest.’

_No chance of that. I’ll be waiting by the goddamn door._

‘Can I at least stay with you tonight?’

He’d said the words before he’d even thought them. Taki’s eyes widened in shock and he looked away. Klaus felt like he’d dropped something. He could only wait to be reprimanded.

 _A fair trade_ , Taki thought, his face burning. He didn’t look up.

‘Fine,’ he said.

He began walking up the stairs to the building before his answer caught up with Klaus. Klaus, who stood there wondering if the world had been turned on its head. Perhaps he’d just had a morphine hallucination.

Halfway up the stairs, a thought occurred to Taki that made him stop. Hasebe, deep in conversation with a colonel near the door, caught sight of the commander and saluted. Taki didn’t even see him.

He’d talked about trust. He’d used it to turn Klaus’ sense of duty and loyalty against him. And yet, only hours ago Taki had told him a lie. An important lie.

_You’re not going to, are you? Do what he asked?_

Hans Regenwalde. His impossible request, which now seemed far less impossible. Hans by his side in battle while Klaus was left behind.

 _Of course not_ , Taki had said.

He turned back around. Klaus was still there at the foot of the stairs.

Klaus, who was still struggling to absorb Taki’s monosyllabic response.

Klaus, who was further surprised to see Taki turn and head back towards him with an unfamiliar look in his eye.

For a split second, he pictured Taki striding right up to him, pulling at Klaus’ coat collar with both hands and kissing him in broad daylight in full view of everyone in the compound. He imagined Hasebe’s jaw hitting the floor.

The thought made him grin like an idiot.

Taki didn’t seem to notice this as he drew up to him once again.

‘Klaus,’ he said, his voice suddenly sounding strained. Almost urgent. ‘Tomorrow, while I’m on the sortie. No matter what happens, or… or what you hear, you have to listen to what I just told you.’

‘What?’ Klaus was having trouble keeping up in general, it appeared.

‘Tell me that you’ll stay here, no matter what happens. Or whatever you might hear about the mission.’ _Or the people who are on the mission._

‘You’re really driving this one into the ground, aren’t you?’

‘Klaus, please.’

He tried to read more into the firm line of Taki’s mouth. The intent eyes. But all he gathered was that his commander’s trust in him had really frayed that much.

‘Alright. Okay.’

‘Swear it.’

‘Geez! Okay, I promise I’ll stay here.’

Another few seconds of feeling like he was on the receiving end of a pair of searchlights.

‘I have some knitting to catch up on anyway,’ he added in a serious tone, hoping to draw out one of those rare Taki Reizen smiles. He didn’t, of course.

When Taki passed through the large double doors with Hasebe, Klaus finally felt the past few minutes catch up with him.

The clouds gathered in ever thicker layers and the temperature dropped steadily but he felt none of it as walked back to his room. He barely even cared that he’d just agreed to being tied to a post for the entirety of their final mission.

At least, at least, he thought. At least there would be tonight.

* * *

And so when the siren began howling not forty minutes later, he sent his first muttered curse to gods old and new, who, up until that point, had been quite good to him.

At least, at least, he now told himself as he flung the door of his shed open and ran at full speed through the courtyard. At least the siren hadn’t waited until the moment he was hovering above Taki, trying to undo his zipper.

His ribs begged for him to slow down. His arm knocked about dangerously in the sling. But he ignored it all and made straight for the general meeting room building, dodging soldiers, officers and cadets. The siren kept wailing, mournful and fearful. Klaus recognised the state of the compound. Organised, tethered chaos. Each man rushing to his post. There was a certain beauty to it, like water gushing around a sink before it channelled its energy into a single, flowing current.

A flash of jade and obsidian made him change direction. Taki, Hasebe and a handful of officers were sprinting towards the tanks. Klaus could hear the steady, clear notes of Taki’s commands even from a distance.

‘Taki!’

But he couldn’t hear him.

Klaus made it to the base of Murakumo just in time. Everywhere around them, soldiers darted up the sides of the metal beasts with an ease that seemed to defy gravity.

Taki was half in the tank and about to pull the hatch closed when he glanced down. His mouth fell slightly open. Klaus wondered whether he imagined that he suddenly looked paler than usual.

‘Klaus! What are you –?’

‘Relax,’ Klaus said, though his panting let his message down somewhat. The pain in his ribs and arms caught up to him like they had been lagging by a few feet. He doubled up, braced on his knees. Taki looked about ready to clamber back out of the tank when Klaus held up his hand.

‘It’s okay,’ he said, trying to catch his breath. ‘Not about to stow away or anything. Just wanted to see you off.’

Brow furrowed, Taki pushed the hatch back.

‘Did you run all the way here?’

‘Taki-sama, we have to go!’ came Second Lieutenant Azusa’s echoing voice from the hull.

Klaus straightened, hand on his hip.

‘It’s okay, go,’ he said.

‘Klaus –’

‘Would you just say goodbye and go, already?’

The pause was filled with the sounds of officers yelling commands and the reluctant, shuddering groans of tanks pulling out of the square. How many farewells did this make now? Klaus wondered. Hadn’t he come to this country to be at Taki’s side?

‘I’ll see you when I get back,’ Taki said finally.

‘Count on it,’ Klaus said, trying a grin. ‘You said yes again, remember? I’m holding you to that.’

Feet on the metal rungs, hand on the hatch, Taki struggled to pull his eyes away from him. He was still huge. Sturdy. Against the backdrop of tanks moving out and the relentless siren howl, Klaus was a single, fixed point; an unreal apparition. His sisters, Taki suddenly remembered, had called him a guardian spirit with golden eyes.

But there was something about Klaus that, in that moment, seemed just a little vulnerable. Something besides the sling and the ribs. A very subtle concavity in his posture. Taki couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but he knew then that he had made the right decision.

He told himself that again to assuage the guilt of dropping out of sight and closing the hatch. There would be no one roaring on a motorbike alongside Murakumo that day.

He avoided everyone’s eye until they were out of sight of the square.

Then a steady, reassuring voice spoke from somewhere on Taki’s left.

‘I don’t think he saw me, Taki-sama. You needn’t worry.’

Taki lifted his chin.

‘I wasn’t worried.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Are the cuffs too tight?’

‘They’re fine. Especially given the circumstances.’ Hans glanced at the guard whose sole duty throughout the mission was to watch him, down the barrel of a gun if necessary.

‘There was no time to thank you properly, earlier,’ said Hans. ‘But I would like to now, at least. For the faith you’re putting in me.’

Azusa tried to ignore the conversation. The back of his neck prickled.

Taki said nothing. His mind was somewhere in the past.

_Was the guardian spirit tall?_

_Yes!_ said a chorus of innocent voices. _Very tall!_

* * *

A collective groan erupted from the cadets. Their commanding officer had just told them that they were to return to their training and regular schedules for the foreseeable future.

‘But the final battle’s being fought out there!’ Ryoumei complained loudly. His voice echoed in the auditorium-turned-dojo. ‘Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, on standby or something?’

‘You’re not the reserves, you’re cadets,’ Honda said tiredly, eyes closed and eyebrows raised. He had all the air of a harassed lieutenant whose primary duty for the past few months had been cadet training. He'd recently received instructions that the boys should be kept occupied unless things turned sour for their side on the front lines, in which case they would be evacuated first.

This had surprised Lietuenant Honda. Normally cadets were, in fact, treated much like reserves; on standby to fight and used as the last line of defence if need be. But the order had come from the commander himself. They were to be treated as minors, not as soldiers.

‘Cadets, reserves,’ Ryoumei grumbled to himself. ‘Same fucking difference.’

Beside him, Haruki grinned and elbowed him in the ribs. But he too felt that simmering anxiety. The memory of the siren still echoed between their ears. Practicing kendo was the last thing on their minds.

‘Partner up,’ Honda ordered, putting on his no-smart-ass-remarks voice. He retreated into the corner, wishing he had a radio to keep up with news on the front.

Shinais in hand, Haruki and Ryoumei faced each other. Despite how they felt only seconds ago, they were surprised to note how quickly their thoughts were filed down when they made eye contact and bowed. All other pairings in the auditorium felt it too. That unique tunnel vision and focus that was forged between adversaries. Even the impending battle and the siren calls and the war-ready adrenaline were shelved, if only for the moment.

Most of the boys lunged, ducked, weaved and struck with their commander in mind. His legendary moves and lethal strikes. There were times when Taki Reizen’s speed and agility seemed almost otherworldly; times when it was easy to believe that there was something divine in the Reizen bloodline. Most of the cadets had been lucky enough to see him in action. They thought of him out there at that moment, fighting for them and their country. They sparred for him.

Haruki Yamamoto, on the other hand, envisioned someone else.

Ryoumei had noticed his change in technique over the months. He watched his friend, who was fast catching up to him in height and stature, lunge with a determination that was quite removed from the nimble-footed darting they’d been taught. He almost charged. With a recklessness that swiftly gave way to surprising strength and dexterity. With a strange glint in his eye that always pushed Ryoumei to the brink of losing his footing. He never quite did, though. Ryoumei was quite a hand with the shinai himself, even if his moves were more traditional.

They sparred furiously.

As sweat flew from his hair and the clack of shinai on shinai reverberated in his skull, Haruki tried to think about the lectures he’d patiently withstood from his father. The importance of the Yamamoto name. The path that had been forged for Haruki in the time of his ancestors. The proud place they had at the side of the Reizens.

Instead, he found that his mind was filled with images of a different kind. Something he’d spied from over a wall months ago. An implausibly tall foreigner, gold hair glinting in the sunlight, bare torso covered in bandages, some blood-splotched, moving with speed and skill that took his breath away. A ferocity that had their own commander backing up and on the defensive. Whenever he’d spun around, Haruki had seen flashes of a broad, white grin, again something alien to the serious, disciplined world of kendo. A smile which declared that everything, whether kendo or war or life itself, was all just a big joke and he was going to deliver the punchline.

Even when Taki had ultimately proven the better fighter, the calmer one, the one in control, and even when Klaus had fallen to his knees before Taki and tilted his head up sheepishly, Haruki was struck by the fact that that smile had remained. He wasn’t near enough to hear what they’d said to each other. But that image had taken root in his mind and refused to let go.

That image was the reason why, with brawn that surprised even him, he managed to outpace Ryoumei, took advantage of his momentary surprise, heard the sound of him falling to the mat and finally stood over him, shinai pointed and chest heaving.

The bastard was smiling, Ryoumei thought incredulously. It made him grin too though. Impossible not to, really. Where Haruki Yamamoto was concerned.

‘Not bad, kid.’

The deep voice pulled Haruki’s head up and he spun around. Ryoumei peered around Haruki’s knees.

Like he’d just been peeled from Haruki’s memory, Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt stood leaning against the auditorium doorway, tan coat and all, his arm in a white sling. He wore the same smile.

Haruki felt his stomach somersault. He held the shinai stick firmly at his side and saluted. After a few seconds, the other boys in the auditorium also caught wind of the presence of an officer and they saluted too, most of them doing a fair job of hiding their reluctance.

‘As you were,’ Klaus said airily.

After a moment, the sound of shinai sticks clashing resounded again.

Haruki remained stiff and upright as Klaus approached. Ryoumei got to his feet slower than he normally would have. He was annoyed again for some reason. Perhaps because he’d just lost, he decided.

‘I’ve never seen moves like that,’ remarked Klaus. ‘Well, not from anyone in this country, anyway. Who taught you how to do that?’

Haruki's cheeks burned.

‘Uh –’

Klaus glanced over the tops of their heads at the far wall, missing Haruki’s discomfort.

‘Hey, Lieutenant!’ he called.

Honda, who’d been sitting on the bench lining the wall with his arms folded, off in his own world, glanced up as if startled. Klaus stopped him from saluting with a dismissive wave.

‘Do you mind if I borrow Cadet Yamamoto for a bit?’

‘Yamamoto?’ Honda echoed. ‘By all means, sir.’ He wondered why the foreigner wasn’t out there at his commander’s side.

Klaus looked back down at Haruki.

‘Feel like helping me out with something?’

‘I –‘ Haruki stuttered, caught off guard. He recovered in time. ‘Yes, of course, sir!'

Also gripping his shinai, Ryoumei suddenly drew alongside Haruki.

‘We’re in the middle of training,’ he told the captain in a firm, steady voice. ‘Sir.’

Haruki turned to him, shocked at both the words and the tone. Klaus also turned a surprised eye on the new cadet. Tousled hair, sloppily tied belt. And something familiar about the look in his face. Something about his stance beside Haruki.

‘We’re not – it’s fine, Klaus-sama,’ said Haruki falteringly, trying to cover up for his friend’s insolence.

 _Ah,_ Klaus thought, unable to stop the smile from spreading across his face. _I’ve stumbled onto a little turf war, have I?_

‘You’ll have him back before you know it,' Klaus assured the overprotective cadet.

 _You can have the kid, kid. I’ve got my own ridiculous turf war to deal with._ But he tried not to let thoughts about Hans crowd him again.

As Klaus headed towards the door with Haruki on his heels, he fancied he could still feel the other cadet’s glare on his back. The kid had balls, Klaus had to admit. It was kind of admirable.

A stand-off with a fourteen year old. Over Haruki Yamamoto. What had his life come to?

He glanced over his shoulder at Haruki. He’d only known the cadet for a handful of minutes at a time but he would bet his bottom dollar that Haruki had no idea what had just taken place.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Oh, that’s Cadet Fukushima. Ryoumei. He’s my roommate.’

Klaus grinned at the floor. He’d had a roommate once.

‘Sorry about him,’ Haruki continued. ‘He gets in trouble a lot for disrespecting his superiors.’

‘Probably why I liked him so much.’

Haruki looked up in surprise and then smiled. Klaus returned it with a wink.

They walked out of the auditorium into a light drizzle. The cloud cover gave the impression that a heavy blanket had been pulled over the now-empty compound. A cold wind whipped at their uniforms.

‘So, I asked around a few of the cadets,’ Klaus said when they were out of anyone’s earshot. ‘To see whether anyone had the scoop on the smuggle scene. Radios, specifically. Took me a while to find someone brave enough to tell me. Most of them figured I was trying to get them in trouble. Anyway, when they finally gave up a name, imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the name of the only cadet I actually knew.’

Haruki blinked, too startled to even remember to blush.

‘I stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago,’ said Klaus. He thought about a nine year old boy he’d once met beneath swaying purple flowers. ‘So I’m taking this as a sign. You with me?’

Haruki most certainly was not.

But by the time they reached the cadet dormitories, Klaus had explained it clearly enough. He needed to know what was happening on the front lines. And, as Klaus discovered less than five minutes after Murakumo had rolled out of the compound, Taki had given express instructions for the men in the radio and telegraph room not to allow Klaus inside. He had sighed at his master’s well-placed paranoia and began scouting cadets.

In Haruki’s room, Klaus stood by the window as Haruki, his cheeks still faintly red, salvaged the stolen radio from the bottom of his wardrobe. The fact that the captain was in his dorm and he was about to openly reveal something that could get him suspended made him feel as though he hadn’t quite woken up yet. He was still wearing his kendogi, he realised idly.

‘It’s… uh,’ he said, turning with the radio in his hands. ‘It’s just a receiver, not a two-way. And it’s not the latest model. We found it in a storage room marked for repair.’

‘And you repaired it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re full of surprises, Cadet.’

Haruki gave a small nervous laugh.

‘Alright, power it up. Try all frequencies for now.’

Haruki sat at the desk and lifted the antenna until it was pointed at a specific tilt out the window. The angle of the antenna hardly made a difference; it was a symbolic gesture Haruki always performed that often made Ryoumei sigh in annoyance.

Klaus sat on Ryoumei’s bed and watched the radio closely.

‘Is there a specific line you want me to intercept, Klaus-sama?’

‘Murakumo.’

Haruki looked at him once before turning back to the dial.

A great deal of static, some brief dialogue from other tanks. (Standard orders. The voices all sounded calm. It appeared they hadn’t made enemy contact yet. It had only been fifteen or so minutes, after all.) And then the dial skimmed over Azusa’s voice. Klaus lifted his hand at that. Haruki turned it back carefully.

_‘…on approach! And confirmed reports of enemy fighter jets, about ten minutes from contact.’_

_‘Find out whether our air defence is ready.’_

Klaus’ heart pounded as Taki’s voice rang clearly through the speakers. He leaned forward.

Haruki felt his pulse race as well. Forget suspension, what he was doing now was enough for expulsion. Maybe even court martial. His imagination raced ahead to his father’s reaction.

But the look on Klaus’ face, the tension that had suddenly and visibly gripped him, was enough to root Haruki to the spot. He turned up the volume.

* * *

For almost five whole minutes, there was just back and forth commands. Taki, then Azusa, then a few unfamiliar voices. Everyone was tense and on alert but there was nothing to indicate fighting yet.

_‘We have confirmed reports, Taki-sama.’_

Azusa again. He then read out a long and detailed list of the enemy’s attack stance. Numbers of fighter jets, ground troops and tanks. Klaus expected Taki to silence him at some point, but he let him read out the full list, plus the movements of each separate element since they started moving hours ago.

Klaus frowned slightly. Information about ground troop movement from hours ago? That information was only minimally useful when they were so close to engaging the enemy.

 _‘What do you think?’_ Taki’s voice said. _‘Do you recognise the strategy?’_

 _‘Yes,’_ said a voice they hadn’t heard until then.

Haruki got the fright of his life when, with no warning, Klaus jumped to his feet. The look in his eyes made Haruki quail.

_‘It’s a Pincer ambush. I’ve seen Ruttgenstein do it before.’_

Klaus’ blood ran cold. He heard a high, thin drone in his ears.

_‘What does that mean for us?’_

_‘We have to watch our flanks. It’s a U-shaped attack where he’ll hide his troops and tanks on the sides for as long as he can.’_

As Taki issued orders rapidly to other tanks, Klaus’ breathing suffered and, on cue, his arm started sending small, sharp pulses of pain throughout his body. He ran a hand through his hair, unaware of Haruki’s anxious eyes watching his every move.

‘Fuck!’ he spat suddenly. ‘The fucking _bastard!_ ’

He would have been there. He would have been there when Klaus stood at the base of Murakumo. He would have been there, coiled up in the bottom of the tank, waiting for Taki to descend.

Taki. Betrayal and confusion welled from a dark place Klaus didn’t even know he had in him.

Without another word, he spun on his heel and wrenched the door open.

‘Klaus-sama!’

His bike was parked beside his shed. It would take him just fifteen minutes to catch up to Murakumo, maybe even less. And when he got there… when he got there, what then? That part didn’t matter. He would blast his way into the tank if he had to.

_Tell me that you’ll stay here, no matter what happens. Or whatever you might hear about the mission._

The voice, even clearer than the one that rang through the radio speakers, made him stop dead in the hallway. With a feeling like a rubber band snapping on his skin, the picture suddenly came into focus. Betrayal clawed at his gut with sharp talons. It was a real thing inside him. He’d never felt it before.

And then he remembered.

He’d sworn. He’d sworn to Taki that he would listen, at least this once. The only fucking time, Klaus realised, where it would have mattered, he had sworn to remain useless.

_If you disobey me this time, I will never be able to trust you again._

* * *

Haruki was both relieved and apprehensive when Klaus stepped back into the room, bringing a dark thundercloud with him. His right fist was shaking by his side.

Behind Haruki, Taki was still issuing orders. Hans’ smooth voice interjected now and then. Each time he spoke, the talons tore at Klaus just a little more.

‘Klaus-sama,’ Haruki tried again timidly. ‘Are you –?’

He didn't at all expect Klaus to turn to Haruki’s wardrobe and slam his fist heavily into the door. Haruki almost jumped out of his chair.

Still breathing unsteadily, paying no mind to his stinging knuckles nor the splintery wound he’d just left in the wardrobe, Klaus began pacing up and down in the narrow gap between Ryoumei and Haruki’s beds. Haruki was reminded quite forcefully of a caged animal.

‘Turn it up,’ was all Klaus said in a frightening, ragged voice.

Haruki did so immediately. At that moment, there was a rumble and interference on the radio waves and the voices increased in pitch and tempo. Klaus stopped and looked round. Haruki’s mouth had gone dry.

_‘Contact!’_

* * *

Klaus’ hand was running through his hair again, eyes glued to the radio as though he could change things just by staring. He’d never felt more helpless in his life.

Blasts came through sounding like frazzled interference. Each time, he felt his heart leap to his throat. Each time, when Taki’s voice emerged and yelled orders, he felt light-headed. It was an endless, cresting cycle.

At long last, there was a lull. Azusa confirmed that the enemy tank had been destroyed by their fighter jets. Taki ordered them to move forward.

Klaus lowered himself weakly onto the bed. Even Haruki felt his heart rate slow down. He realised he’d been gripping the desk subconsciously and relaxed his hands.

Azusa had more good news. Their new offensive, targeting the Pincer ambush, was well underway on the right flank.

 _‘What about the left?’_ Taki wanted to know.

There was tense silence for a while.

_‘Azusa?’_

_‘Taki-sama,’_ Azusa sounded nervous. _‘We just got word that Colonel Shizuka’s comms are down. Their platoon is fine but no one’s been able to get through for ages. He doesn’t know about the new formation.’_

_‘Is there anyone else nearby who can lead the left flank attack?’_

_‘No, sir.’_

A pause where Klaus could almost see Taki’s look of intense concentration.

_‘I can lead them.’_

The voice made Klaus grit his teeth.

_‘If you put me in a jeep. I’ll drive out to Shizuka and help him locate the hidden flank and attack.’_

Pain radiated up his arm, trying to blot out the rest of the world. Klaus felt his head swim. After everything he’d been through, sitting still on a bed in a cadet’s dorm room had turned into one of the most difficult moments of his life.

 _‘Do you know where Shizuka might be?’_ asked Hans.

_‘From their last transmission they’re near the western ridge by the river.’_

Klaus heard the hesitation in Taki’s voice. He recognised it.

_Don’t you fucking do it, Taki. He’s lying. Can’t you tell he’s –?_

_‘Alright,’_ Taki said. He gave orders for the nearest jeep to draw up alongside Murakumo.

‘Taki…’

Haruki looked up at the strange tone in the captain’s voice. He felt it tug at his heart in a way he couldn’t place.

Klaus, meanwhile, wasn’t even aware he’d said anything out loud.

For the next few minutes, it was hard to visualise what was taking place. Standard reports and orders. He kept his ears tuned, ignoring his arm, ignoring his pulse.

And then finally:

 _‘Make sure you stay on the radio,’_ Taki said. _‘And be careful.’_

_‘I will, Commander. I’ll see you when I get back.’_

He didn’t think there was anything inside him left to tear, but the claws kept tearing anyway.


	10. At the Water's Edge

When their gazes met again, there was an unfamiliar look in Klaus’ eye.

‘Um… Klau-?’

The words were smothered by an entirely unexpected kiss. Shock and incredulity swiftly gave way to a flare of desire. Something that had been long suppressed.

They pressed into the wall, tongue on tongue. Klaus’ mind was both racing ahead and refusing to consider the implications.

Finally, after several heated seconds, Greta pulled away.

‘We’ll get caught,’ were the first words she could think of. It was hard to concentrate under his fierce gaze. His eyes were golden, she thought for the umpteenth time. How unlikely.

He chuckled and tried to kiss her again.

‘Klaus!’

She turned her face and felt his lips on her neck instead. Her toes curled.

‘Not here! There might be teachers nearby.’

Klaus looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Is that the only reason?’

Light pink dusted her cheeks. She always blushed easily, Klaus thought. Even back when they were in the seventh grade.

It was nearing midnight and they were pressed against the brick wall of the girls’ dorm building, right beneath the tree where they’d been meeting, platonically, for years. Greta Scholz wondered if she was dreaming.

‘Well,’ she said, pleased to hear she sounded almost like herself. ‘There’s also the fact that we’ve been friends since we were twelve.’

‘We can still be friends, right?’ Klaus asked, burying his face in her neck again. Her perfume smelled sweet and wonderful but the taste of it on her skin was somewhat bitter. Always a problem with girls.

Greta had to laugh. ‘Sure.’

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’ _I’m just going to be another notch on your belt, Wolfstadt._

‘Want to sneak out and go down to the river?’

‘What, now? It’s nearly midnight!’ 

‘So?’

‘It could be dangerous there.’

‘You’re with me!’ A smile as wide as the horizon. Greta felt a familiar flare in her chest.

‘You’re just a sixteen year old who’s kind of good at soccer,’ she said dryly.

‘Why are you always so cruel to me?’

But she went with him. They skidded down the grassy slope of the river bank, the moonlight making their golden heads appear silver. With the wind tugging at her nightdress and Klaus’ coat wrapped around her, Greta was now almost certain it was a dream. She tripped over her own feet once and Klaus grabbed her arm before she fell.

‘Did you do that on purpose just to play damsel in distress?’

She slapped his shoulder just hard enough to hurt. He laughed and pulled her into another kiss. Up on her tiptoes, Greta looped her arms around his neck. They were right at the edge of the sandy bank.

When Greta pulled away, she tucked her hair behind her ear, glanced over Klaus’ shoulder and screamed.

Heart in his mouth, Klaus spun around.

‘I’m – I’m sorry.’

It took him a while to place the voice. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and there was Hans Regenwalde sitting at the water’s edge, apparently frozen in place.

‘Hans?’

Greta tried to calm her pulse, relieved that Klaus knew him.

‘I – oh my god, I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘You just gave me a fright!’

‘The hell are you doing over there?’ said Klaus with an incredulous smile.

‘I’m… Nothing, I was just -’

Hans got to his feet unsteadily. He’s tall, Greta thought. Almost as tall as Klaus.

‘I’ll just go,’ he said in his low, uncertain voice. ‘I’m sorry to have scared you.’

Something about his tone moved Greta. It was too dark to see but she could almost imagine the downturned eyes behind his curtain of hair. He started walking up the grassy slope in the direction of the boys’ dorms.

‘No, wait,’ she said, stepping around Klaus. ‘It’s fine. You were here first.’

Hans paused and looked back.

‘No, that’s –’

‘I should be getting back to the dorm anyway,’ she continued. ‘I have exams coming up.’

Klaus felt the night slipping through his fingers.

‘Wait –’

‘I don’t know why I let this big idiot talk me into coming here in the first place.’ She threw Klaus a look he knew well.

‘Oh, come on, Scholz –’

‘You can stay here if you like. I can walk back.’

Klaus sighed in defeat and then smiled.

‘Yeah, like I’m going to let you walk back alone at night.’

As they headed up the slope, Greta saw the tall boy hesitate before sitting back down on the riverbank. She felt a pang for him. His quiet voice and his solitude. His hesitation.

‘Who was that?’ she asked when they were back on the path.

‘A guy in my class. Bit of a weirdo but he’s nice enough.’

‘Are you guys friends?’

‘I don’t know. Sort of. A few weeks ago these guys were wailing on him and I flew to his rescue like a knight in shining armour.’ Greta rolled her eyes at the sidelong grin he threw her. ‘We’ve hung out a couple of times since then. Just in the cafeteria and stuff.’

She thought about him sitting on the riverbank staring across the water.

‘I hope he’ll be okay.’

Klaus chuckled and threw an arm around her shoulders.

‘Should I be jealous already?’

‘You’re so annoying.’

* * *

At the dorm building, he kissed her again.

‘Oh!’ She broke away, feeling her cheeks burn. ‘I almost forgot why I told you to come here in the first place.’

‘So it wasn’t just to try and get in my pants?’

She huffed and turned on her heel, telling him to wait there. She returned with a heavy plastic bag.

‘My brother says you owe him,’ she said, handing it to him. Several six-packs of beer and a bottle of vodka jostled for space inside.

‘Oh, he's a champ! Tell him thanks from me. And from all the guys in my dorm.’

‘Try not to get expelled, okay?’

Another kiss, this one lingering for a long time. Klaus pulled back and kissed her once on the cheek. As he turned to go, she remembered she was still wearing his coat.

‘Keep it,’ he said when she started to take it off.

‘What? No –’

‘Just keep it.’ He winked. ‘It’ll make you think of me.’

She watched him walk away with the bag slung over his shoulder. Her feelings at that moment were a tangle of coloured ribbons but she was smart enough to be able to comb through it. Slowly, she walked up the stairs and into her room. When she was done untangling, what was left was simmering excitement about the next few days, perhaps weeks. And sadness over the predictable end.

The coat, she knew, was the only thing of his that he was able to give her.

* * *

‘Hey!’

Hans turned in surprise to see Klaus sliding back down the slope, this time carrying a bag.

‘Figured you’d still be here.’

Without any preamble he sat heavily on the sandy bank beside Hans and tossed him a beer.

‘Drink up.’

Hans stared at the bottle in his hand.

‘I… I don’t drink.’

‘No kidding. Really?’ He fished out another bottle for himself. ‘As in you’ve never had a drink in your life?’

‘No.’

He laughed. ‘You’re my hero.’

Staring out at the expanse of the river before them, Klaus tried to twist the top off his beer. The moon cast a glossy, shimmering band over its surface. If he squinted, he could almost make the tree line on the opposite shore recede. That way, he could pretend it was the horizon and he was about to take off over the ocean.

Hans still gripped the bottle, already struggling to remember what solitude had been like. He glanced nervously at Klaus’ happy, oblivious face and thought about what had happened.

‘I’m sorry to have interrupted earlier,’ he said in careful tones.

‘Ah, not your fault. And there’s always next time.’

There was a comfortable enough silence.

‘She’s very pretty,’ Hans said.

‘She is, isn't she? Don’t know why it took me this long to make a move.’ He raised his eyebrows and reflected. ‘I guess I had my hands full.’

Arrogance seemed almost charming on him, Hans thought. He handed Klaus back the beer.

‘Sure you don’t want it?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Okay.’ He slipped a hand under his shirt to help twist the top off the bottle. ‘More for me.’

* * *

Crickets chirped. The river gently lapped against the sand at their feet. Klaus was only halfway through the beer before he began to feel a slight buzz.

‘What’s your plan after this? After school, I mean?’

Hans hesitated.

‘I don’t know yet.’ He braved another glance at Klaus. ‘What about you?’

‘Military. Air force. I decided when I was a kid.’

Klaus stretched out and rested his head back on one hand. Stars through canopy, he realised for the first time. There was something about it. Like a huge, sparkling tear in the sky.

‘I’m going to learn how to fly.’

It was almost too easy for Hans to imagine.

They lapsed into another silence. The wind stirred moonbeams on the river.

‘Hey,' said Klaus at length, his voice slightly different. 'Ever been to the east?’

‘You mean the eastern countries?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No, never. Why?’

‘I went last year. My father dragged us. It was prettier than I thought it would be.’ He dug his bottle absently into the sand. ‘And I… There was this boy I met…’

Hans looked down at him. Klaus’ eyes were somewhere in the distance. Somewhere under the swaying wisteria and in the spellbinding gaze of a boy who couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.  _Carry me to where those flowers grow._

A year on, Klaus wasn't at all sure that he hadn't imagined the whole thing.

He became aware that Hans was staring and he pulled himself back with a self-conscious grin.

‘They dress funny over there,’ he concluded. He thought about Greta. ‘Scholz would have loved to see it. She’s always been nuts for eastern culture.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, Greta. The girl I was with earlier.’

‘So you’ve known her for a while?’

‘Yeah, we’re good friends.’ He grinned. ‘Interesting friends now.’

‘She loves you.’

Hans froze, shocked to hear the words come out of his mouth. Klaus blinked at him for a few seconds and then laughed.

‘I highly doubt that.’

Almost encouraged that Klaus hadn’t flown off the handle, Hans spoke again, sounding like he was testing the surface of an icy lake.

‘She does. Very deeply.’

The way he said it made Klaus’ grin flicker just a little. He stared at him.

‘And how would you know that?’

‘I just… I know.’

Eyebrows went up, demanding elaboration.

‘I’ve always been good at… reading people, I guess.’

‘Oh, really?’ He sat up to take a swig of beer and fixed Hans with a look that was at once challenging and playful. ‘Then what am I thinking right now?’

After a few seconds, Hans felt the heat rise to his face and he turned away.

‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly. ‘Probably along the lines of you and Greta.’

Klaus laughed, impressed.

‘Hey, not bad. Though after everything that happened tonight I probably gave myself away a bit.’

‘I guess.’

‘So you reckon she loves me, huh?’

Hans didn’t reply.

Klaus sighed. ‘I really hope you’re wrong.’

(He wasn't. Only a few weeks later, Greta would confess, without tears and with only a slight tremor in her voice, that she knew her feelings for him would never be reciprocated and that it would be best for them not to see each other again. He would watch her, feeling helpless. They barely spoke afterwards and, though he never quite let on, the loss of his friend marked him quite deeply.)

‘I gather you don't feel the same way,’ said Hans.

Another sip. A thoughtful scratch under his chin.

‘I don't think I've _ever_ felt that way. Maybe I'm not the type, you know?’ His smile flashed through the gloom. ‘Can you imagine me being in love? It'd be either scary or pathetic. Or both.’

He then looked at Hans properly, the long red-tinged hair and thin face, and reflected on everything they’d managed to talk about in a few short minutes. He picked up the bottle Hans had returned to him and held it out again.

‘Look, I know we don't know each other that well. But I think it’s high time you had your first beer. Hmm? Come on, can't just be me sitting here spilling my guts.’

Hans looked down at the moonlight shining off the label then up at Klaus. He knew he could refuse again and that Klaus wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. But something compelled him to take the bottle.

Klaus felt a strange sense of accomplishment watching Hans struggle with the lid and then take it off.

‘Cheers!’ he said, inclining his bottle.

‘Cheers.’

Their bottles clinked and Hans took his first sip.


	11. Breathing Fire

The battle, which lasted eight long hours, ended shortly before midnight. And the Fifteenth Armoured Division emerged victorious.

Word reached the compound in no time. Like a flickering, lively wildfire, sounds of celebration spread through the dorms and halls. The cadets were, of course, the main culprits. Smuggled bottles of alcohol were suddenly broken out in plain view. People were throwing arms around their comrades and whooping for joy. Even their minders were happy to turn a blind eye. While the officers themselves were far too disciplined to take part in any victory showboating, they guiltily indulged that part of themselves by allowing the cadets to go wild, if only for a few precious minutes.

There were reports that Taki-sama would be returning shortly. Love for the young commander bounded like a real live thing from the hearts of everyone in the compound.

In their dorm where a few of the other boys had already gathered, Ryoumei took a happy swig of beer and looked out the window, wondering where in the world Haruki and the Saxon had disappeared to hours earlier. He also wondered why there was a splintery hole in Haruki’s wardrobe.

* * *

The sounds of victory spread everywhere throughout the compound. Except, that is, for the small shed sitting in the corner of the officers' courtyard.

Haruki looked up nervously, struggling to pin down the appropriate emotion. He should be happy, that much he knew. But Klaus hadn’t moved for ten whole minutes; ever since Taki’s pleased, exhausted voice had declared the mission a job well done and given the turn-back order. And it was impossible for Haruki to harbour any real thoughts of celebration after witnessing the shadow that had fallen across Klaus’ face. It almost made him doubt whether they’d even won.

For the past seven hours since they left Haruki’s dorm (after Haruki remembered that the other cadets would soon be returning) Klaus had paced his shed with wide, furious strides. He had gone pale with every blast. He’d paused with a hand in his hair each time Taki’s voice rose in pitch. He’d sat on the bed for only seconds at a time before getting to his feet again.

At Klaus’ desk, radio still in his hands and fingers navigating the dial every now and then, Haruki had learned to pay close attention whenever there was word from Shizuka’s platoon. During those crucial moments, the intensity of Klaus’ gaze threatened to melt the object on which it landed. He muttered under his breath. Each time they heard the voice of the soldier who had inspired such hatred in Klaus, Haruki heard him cursing, warning Taki from afar, willing him to listen.

He didn’t.

And they won.

Now, as they listened to Taki’s voice calmly asking for casualty reports on their return home, Haruki tried to work up the nerve to say something. If nothing else, just to confirm that the captain (sitting on his bed, head lowered, feet apart, staring at the floor) hadn’t turned to stone.

‘Klaus-sama?’

Haruki couldn’t be sure if it was because he spoke or if the timing was just a coincidence. At that moment, Klaus got to his feet and left his shed without a backwards glance.

* * *

The periodic silences inside Murakumo seemed unreal. The men were struggling to contain their glee and only the strictest level of professionalism, not to mention the fact that they were an arm’s length away from their commander, kept them in check.

‘Taki-sama,’ said Azusa. ‘We just received more reports from the Fourteenth Division.’

The last loose thread, Taki thought.

‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re still struggling. The Sixteenth just declared victory but the Alliance has focused their remaining forces on the Fourteenth, which is outnumbered. Ruttgenstein’s pulled back after his losses but we think he’ll hit their division again in the morning.’

‘But he’s lost,’ Taki thought aloud. ‘He knows he’ll lose there too; that we’ll all go to the Fourteenth Division’s aid. Surely he knows the war will be over by tomorrow. Why doesn’t he just surrender and spare his men?'

‘He’ll fight until he has literally no one left to fight with,’ said Hans’ voice through the radio. ‘It’s all he knows to do.’

Such pride, Taki thought, for a split second almost feeling a very specific, guilty kinship with Ruttgenstein. He mulled it over. They’d need time to take stock of their own losses. But they could head out at first light. Enough time, even, for his men to get some well-deserved sleep beforehand. And then the war would be over by morning. It would all be over, he thought numbly, by morning.

His mind thus occupied, Taki entirely forgot to order Hans’ jeep to drive up alongside Murakumo as they returned to the compound.

And so Hans arrived a full five minutes before Taki did.

When Taki clambered out of the tank, heart pouding, he was met with the sight of Klaus and Hans locked in a fierce struggle on the ground. Officers hovered nearby, trying to break them up.

‘Klaus!’

Hearing Taki’s voice enraged him even more. He swung his fist and it made contact again, this time with Hans’ left eye. Beneath him, Hans blocked his next punch and managed to swing his elbow up into Klaus’ neck. The momentary shock allowed him to punch him in the cheek and scramble to his feet.

Recovering in seconds, Klaus was also up and swung at his face again, wiping blood from his mouth where one of Hans’ punches earlier had landed. Hans ducked the heavy swing and got in a good blow to Klaus’ torso, not far from his wounded ribs.

Klaus grunted and stumbled back. Hans stood his ground, panting, waiting for the inevitable return.

The fact that they were standing gave Taki an opportunity to step between them. But from the look on Klaus’ face Taki was not at all sure whether he alone was enough to stop him. He was relieved when Hasebe and Uemura came to his aid.

‘Get out of the way,’ Klaus breathed.

‘Klaus, stop!’

Taki then experienced, for the first time, the full, brute strength of Klaus von Wolfstadt. Even with an arm in a sling and wounded ribs, it took all three of them to hold him back. Taki’s mind raced to figure out how to bring him back.

‘We won,’ he said, his hands on Klaus’ arm and chest. ‘We won today, Klaus. Because of him.’

It had the intended effect but not at all for the reason Taki had in mind. Klaus stopped and glared at Taki, eyes sharp with disbelief.

‘Say that again,’ he hissed.

Taki felt a wave of dread.

‘That’s enough, Wolfstadt,’ said Hasebe, his hackles raised after picking up on the implicit threat to the commander. ‘One more move and I won’t hesitate to shoot you where you are.’

Klaus’s eyes were interrogative. Angry. Hurt. Taki was suddenly at the bottom of a deep well, with the glaring light of midday shining directly down.

Hans, meanwhile, was recovering his breath and stood to his full height, his left eye and jaw throbbing.

‘Taki-sama,’ said Uemura, who was still watching Klaus uncertainly. ‘The Fourteenth Division just sent another request for backup. They want to know how many troops and tanks we can send.’

Klaus was again staring at Hans with murder in his eyes.

‘Enough, Klaus,’ Taki said, in as authoritative a voice as he could manage. ‘We don’t have time for this. Go back to your room. I’ll speak with you later.’ There was no indication that Klaus had even heard him. Taki’s impatience hit its peak. ‘Are you listening to me?’

At that, Klaus snapped his eyes back on Taki. Hasebe’s hand instinctively went to his holster.

‘I’m done listening to you,’ Klaus said in a low rumble.

Taki barely had time to be winded by his words.

Though Klaus would sooner be shot by Hasebe than admit it, his ribs had suffered a great deal in the fistfight. He was ready to drop on the spot from the pain. And he was angry enough, wild and irrational though his anger was, that he couldn't look at Taki for much longer.

So he did the only thing he could do. The very last thing he would normally have done. He turned and walked away.

Still stunned, Taki gathered himself just in time.

‘My room,’ he said, his cold voice echoing across the square. ‘In an hour.’

Klaus paused only for a moment before he kept going. He was slowly taken in by the darkness surrounding the floodlights of the square.

In the wake of the receding tan coat, Taki’s victory on the front lines suddenly seemed petty. Like a distant, unimportant memory.

With a bitter taste in his mouth, Taki turned to Uemura and tried to form a coherent thought about their plan for the following morning.

He had taken a few steps towards the general meeting room before he remembered Hans Regenwalde. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the guard, who had watched Hans like a hawk for the entire length of the mission, placing him back under official arrest and cuffing his wrists. Taki walked over.

‘That’s not necessary,’ he told the guard.

After Hans was uncuffed again, Taki stared at him for a moment or two, wondering where on Earth to begin. For his part, Hans seemed entirely unfazed by his encounter with Klaus only moments ago.

‘Will you be okay going back to your cell?’ Taki said eventually.

‘That sounds fine to me, Commander.’

Now that things had calmed down on the square, Taki began to notice things. He noticed the rain had let up and the floodlights only occasionally glanced off the little darting drops. He noticed the sporadic sounds of laughter and pops and whoops erupting from the dorms and courtyard. He noticed something new in the weary grins of soldiers trooping past him, saluting him, their eyes heavy with emotion.

Taki nodded at them, feeling a mix of pride, incredulity and exhaustion. He turned back to Hans.

‘I'm very sorry for –’ He struggled and tried again. ‘I can’t put into words how much I owe you for today. And for everything else you've done. This country owes –’

‘Taki-sama. Please don't worry about that for now. It sounds like you have enough to deal with.’

Taki looked at him gratefully before falling back into step with Uemura and Hasebe.

* * *

The hour mark came and went and there was still no sign of Klaus.

It was Taki’s turn to pace. He wondered if he should try to find him. He even got as far as the hallway.

But there, instead of turning towards the exit, he headed for the stairs. He climbed a few flights and drew up to the door of what was once a large walk-in closet. The guard stepped to the side and Taki knocked gently, mindful of the fact that it was past one in the morning.

‘Yes?’

‘Lieutenant General. Did I wake you?’

‘Not at all, Commander. Please, come in.’

The room was swimming in the pleasant, amber glow cast by the bedside lamp. Hans got to his feet as Taki entered.

Taki had come with a single, important question in mind. But under that calm grey gaze, it suddenly seemed irrational. So, instead, he discussed strategy again. He outlined the hour-long meeting he’d just had with headquarters. How they would go help the Fourteenth Division at first light. How they would most likely need Hans’ help.

‘Certainly, Taki-sama. I’m at your disposal.’

Although Taki had known Hans would agree, his detached, effortless devotion inspired a rush of relief. And gratitude again.

‘Hans…’

He then felt a little self-conscious. They were both aware it was the first time he'd called Hans by his first name.

‘Why does –?’ Now that he had brought himself to the point of asking, it seemed ridiculous all over again. ‘Is there a reason that Klaus –?’

‘Distrusts me so much?’ Hans finished for him. ‘Around you, specifically?’

Taki closed his mouth and looked away, feeling a flush creep up his neck. He let out a frustrated sigh, though he couldn’t tell if it was directed at Klaus or himself.

Hans also hesitated.

‘Forgive me, Taki-sama.’ He sounded genuinely contrite. ‘I’m afraid that's something you need to hear from him.’

* * *

Klaus finally arrived a full hour late. He came in without knocking and planted himself not far from the door. His face, for once, was unreadable.

Taki put aside the maps of the area surrounding the Fourteenth Division and felt his pulse pick up again. Facing Ruttgenstein's ambush, he realised, was almost preferable to this.

‘Where have you been?’

Klaus’ jaw twitched.

‘Why do you care?’

His tone made Taki’s breath catch in his throat again.

Klaus had, in fact, meant to be there on time. But by the time he arrived back in his room (relieved to find that Haruki had left), the bullet wound in his arm had joined the chorus of pain in his ribs. After a few minutes trying to withstand it, he’d given himself the last vial of morphine in his satchel. He had then spent the past two hours in a morphine slump in his room.

Though the physical pain had ebbed, he now watched Taki with a newfound hurt for which he knew they’d be hard pressed to find a cure.

Meanwhile, in the grip of a tornado of feelings, Taki managed to salvage just one powerful one. Anger.

And so their fight began.

* * *

Klaus had never before been so let down by his powers of speech. No matter how much he tried to get them across, his feelings of betrayal never sounded like anything more than an elaborate tantrum. 

Taki, for his part, managed to dampen his growing guilt by honing in on one irrefutable argument.

‘Your jealousy is clouding your judgment, Klaus! You’re not thinking clearly!’

‘And you’re so goddamn desperate to win the war that you’re willing to overlook the most obvious signs. He's still up to something, I know he is! And you’ve done nothing but play into his hands since the beginning!'

They were both standing. Both flushed. Taki stood by his desk and Klaus by the door. He seemed ready to flee, Taki thought. Again, the thought was strange and unnerving.

‘How naïve do you think I am?’ Taki felt his hands ball into fists. ‘Do you really think I just took him at his word?’

‘That’s how it damn well seems to me!’

‘While you were on Operation Hannibal, I ordered Hans’ past to be looked into. I had headquarters send their top spies to dig up whatever they could.’

This was news to Klaus. He faltered for a second.

‘Everything he said,’ Taki continued. ‘Everything he said is true. There _is_ an organisation working to depose the Western Alliance from within. It’s all real. There are others like him. A whole network. And after what he did today, he’s made his allegiance perfectly clear. What more does he need to do to prove himself?’

Klaus’ response was interrupted by a voice outside the door.

‘Taki-sama?’

An officer who’d possibly been summoned by a nervous soldier on patrol. The sound of Taki yelling had put them on edge.

‘Are you okay, sir?’

Klaus threw him a cold, sarcastic look.

‘ _Are_ you okay, Taki? Maybe you don’t trust me enough. Maybe someone needs to be in here to vouch for your safety.’

Taki tried his best to ignore him. He sent the officer away and waited for his footsteps to retreat.

‘You lied to me.’

Klaus’ tone was brittle. Like he hadn’t had enough time to get used to the reality of it yet.

Guilt finally swam up from the murky depths. Taki’s response had been on the tip of his tongue, ready to fire.

_I had to. It was the only way to win. And to keep you safe. I had to._

Instead, he heard himself say, in an entirely different voice, ‘I’m sorry.’

Finally, after hours and hours of withstanding the awful churning, solidifying mess inside him, Klaus felt something soften. He tried to recall if Taki had ever apologised to him before.

‘I know I lied. I shouldn’t have.’

Taki’s gaze had dropped. His hair completely obscured his right eye. The left was swimming in an unusual emotion. His mouth… his mouth was goddamn beautiful, Klaus thought, angry at himself for thinking so. It wasn’t fair.

Taki took a deep breath and picked a spot on the floor on which to focus his energy.

‘If… if I let you come with me tomorrow, to help the Fourteenth Division…' 

Klaus lifted his chin, daring to let himself feel a small ray of light.

‘Would it – would you –?’

_Would you forgive me?_

But Taki couldn’t bring himself to say it. Instead, he diverted his train of thought to logistics. To Klaus’ injuries.

‘But not on your bike. You’re not strong enough for that sort of combat yet.’ His voice grew just a touch in confidence. ‘You’ll ride in Murakumo with me as my second in command. Not as my knight.’ He looked up. ‘Just for tomorrow.’

He was relieved beyond words to see Klaus’ expression had softened tremendously. There was a pause where Klaus considered the weight of Taki’s words. How much it had taken for him to say them, even though they didn’t sound like much.

The monster of betrayal, the scaly creature that had recently formed in his gut, was still there, still fuming, but it had curled up tentatively. Just for now.

_As my second in command. Not as my knight._

‘Taki,’ he said, though his voice remained guarded. Almost ironic. ‘I’ll be whatever you want me to be. That’s all I’ve ever done.’

It wasn’t the first time that something Klaus had said, almost in passing, had moved Taki almost to tears. He felt the guilt catch up with him then in one full blast. He looked away again.

He seemed so vulnerable there, in the middle of his own bedroom, that Klaus found it hard to reconcile him with the confident, booming voice he’d heard through the speakers on Haruki’s radio; a voice that had commanded his entire division to a resounding victory.

He tried to shelve the past eight hours. He tried to focus on tonight. And the following morning when he would be at his master’s side again.

Crossing the space between them, drinking in the way Taki glanced up at him in surprise, Klaus took Taki’s ungloved hand in his. He pressed it to his lips as though he wanted everything to be wiped clean in that one move.

They were both standing by the train, their hair and coats steadily getting wetter in the downpour. Taki was speechless again. He realised, with a small shock, that he’d made his decision before Klaus had even finished making his impossible request.

 _Yes_ , he thought.

Klaus seemed to hear him then too. He tilted Taki’s face up and kissed him. Taki felt the victory of the past day mingle with the immensity of his relief and found himself returning the kiss, seeking out the familiar taste and warmth of Klaus’ mouth. He felt a large arm circle his waist, pulling him closer, crushing his chest against Klaus’ sling.

In seconds they were on Taki’s bed, Klaus kissing his way down Taki’s neck. His hand was urgently undoing Taki’s pants and trying to tug them off. There was no time to undo the buttons of his shirt or to appreciate the softness of his lips. The need to fuck Taki again, to prove something, to prove it to Taki and himself alike, was overpowering.

And then, as if it had waited for that moment, a glittering snake flashed across the bedspread. Klaus paused, his head full of Taki’s scent, wondering how it could have taken so long for it to have occurred to him.

 _Don’t_ , a voice told him firmly. _Just leave it. Just enjoy this, now._

‘Taki,’ he said, his voice hoarse with lust.

Taki looked down at him enquiringly, his lips already slightly swollen from their kiss. Klaus’ cock was agonisingly hard.

‘Is… is he going to be there tomorrow?’

The anxiety returned in slow, undulating waves. Taki felt Klaus’ eyes searching him out again.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. He couldn’t think of what else to say.

Klaus saw it in that moment. He would be sitting safe and warm next to Taki in the tank while Hans roared ahead in the jeep, winning the war for his commander.

This time it didn't take an officer asking a question through the door. Or Haruki Yamamoto knocking on the door of his shed asking to keep his gun. Or Suguri bursting in. Or for it to have all been a dream. This time Klaus broke the atmosphere in half all by himself.

He rose up and fixed Taki with a look that inspired a genuine spark of fear.

Then, just as abruptly, he was on the edge of the bed.

‘Klaus –’ Taki began, wondering how many more turbulent shifts in gear he would have to endure that night.

‘I know what I promised you,’ Klaus said, almost to himself. ‘When I said I would be there for you no matter what. But I can’t. I can’t do it with him there. With him next to you.’

He was on his feet and heading for the door when Taki sat up and finally lent his voice to the question that had been plaguing him for months.

‘I want to know about you and Hans. Why do you hate him so much?'

Klaus froze. Taki pressed on.

‘Were you… were you like us?’

There it was, finally.

After a terrible silence, after a futile few seconds of keeping the images at bay, the morphine and anger and jealousy came to a head. Klaus suddenly turned and kicked the chair by Taki’s desk. It skittered noisily towards the window.

For Taki, what was more shocking than the kick was the sight of Klaus’ flushed face when he turned.

‘It was… I was drunk.’

Taki's breath caught in his throat.

‘I thought he was too but he wasn’t. We were sixteen and stupid. I made him have his first beer. After we snuck back into the dorms, he helped me to bed and…’

 _Shut the fuck up_ , Klaus told himself furiously. But he couldn’t. Something in the way Taki was looking at him made the whole thing tumble from the past.

‘I woke up and he was… way too close. He looked shocked, like he’d been caught, and I pushed him back too hard and he fell, and I… I was drunk. I helped him back up and we nearly…’

He couldn’t get the rest of the words out.

Taki felt himself sinking.

_Klaus can be quite persuasive in that department. Or so I’ve heard._

Only then did he understand the true nature and extent of the jealousy that Klaus had been battling. It was like nothing else, he realised. It was powerful. Irrational.

‘Nothing happened!’ Klaus said, his voice tense and desperate. ‘Not… not really. I sort of came to my senses and pulled away. And he just left. We didn’t talk after that.’

After a few seconds, in a low, entirely different voice, Klaus said, ‘There’s something about him, Taki. Something off. He knows too much. There are things he knows that he couldn’t possibly –’

Even though his words rang loud and true, Taki finally spoke up, his voice shaking only slightly.

‘You have to stop trying to undermine him just because of something that happened ten years ago. We’re this close to winning. It’s all thanks to him. He’s the reason we knew about the railway supply line. He’s the reason we knew about Ruttgenstein’s strategy today.’

The flush on Klaus’ face had all but gone. An icy look was taking its place. One that Taki had foolishly thought he’d fixed just by asking Klaus to come with him tomorrow.

‘You trust him completely, don’t you?’

Again, it sounded like Klaus was talking to himself. He turned back to the door.

_I have to find a way to stop you from trusting him._

Taki sat up fully, his head spinning. It was the second time that day he’d had to watch Klaus leave. This time, he was gripped by the certainty that if Klaus left, it would be the end of something.

‘Where are you going? Klaus?’

Klaus drew up to the door.

‘If you leave now,’ said Taki, surprised to hear his voice sounded a lot stronger than he felt. ‘I'll consider it a betrayal. Of your duty to me.’

Klaus suddenly laughed and the sound sent chills up Taki's spine. He turned.

‘Nice try. I stayed put last time. Too late to play the same card.’

A flare of anger.

‘This isn’t a game, Klaus. I shouldn't have to play any card. You're my knight. You're supposed to obey my orders no matter what they are!’

Klaus rounded on him again, eyes livid.

‘Your knight? That's a fucking good point. Why _am_ I your knight, Taki?’

There was another terrible pause. Somewhere in the back of his mind, and out of nowhere, Taki remembered the river he had fallen into as a child.

‘What?’

‘Why the hell am I even here? Why did you bring me here?’

Taki wanted to shrink from the question.

‘I thought it was because you wanted to be with me. To be with me!’

Klaus pressed his hand to his chest. The way he said those words broke something in Taki. Salt water and rushes of sound.

‘But all you did since I came here was find ways to push me away. And push me away. You made me feel like I was nothing to you.’ His voice steadily rose in volume. ‘And then one day I find out from Suguri, of all people, that you're never meant to be with _anyone!_ That I defiled something. That I ruined you. What was I supposed to do with that? _What am I supposed to do with that now?’_

He seemed to fill the entire room. Taki was cornered. Surrounded by accusations that were dredged up from his guiltiest of thoughts and lined up before his eyes.

‘I'm tired of it,’ said Klaus, his voice suddenly dropping, his face suddenly drawn. ‘I'm tired of you pushing me away and then pulling me back. There's only so much I can take.’

Taki tried to feel for something, for that membrane that stretched between them even when Klaus was flying away from him, through the dead of night, towards the enemy. It wasn't there anymore. Klaus went back to the door and opened it.

‘Don't go,’ Taki said, his voice choked. He reached for something. Anything. All he could come up with was, ‘That's an order.’

Klaus seemed not to hear him. His next words were thrown over his shoulder.

‘If all you wanted was someone to help you win the war, you have him now.’

And he was gone.

Without even slamming the door. Of all things, that one insignificant detail was what finally triggered the tears.

It would all be over. Taki had let himself believe that not long ago with something close to happiness and relief. The war would be over by tomorrow morning. And he would have Klaus.

* * *

As the motorbike roared to life and he pulled his goggles over his eyes, Klaus refused to consider the full import of everything he’d said. His words had taken on a life of their own. The monster had reared, breathing fire and raining scales, and he had just let it take over. He’d even watched, with twisted satisfaction, the shock and guilt etched across Taki’s face.

He had meant his words. And on another level he hadn’t meant them at all. He always intended to come back.

For him, it boiled down to a single truth: there was no point in winning the war if it meant losing Taki.

His bike tore up the path through the courtyard and out of the compound.

* * *

The moon shone steadily on the black river.

At the water’s edge, Hans made a face and spat some of the vodka back out. Klaus laughed.

‘Yeah, that was me the first time too.’ His words slurred together. ‘It gets better, trust me.’

He poured a capful for himself, his fifth one of the night, and tossed it back. Hans watched with envy. Every single one of his actions was fluid. Like he’d been born to do them. He passed another capful to Hans, who did a better job that time of keeping it down. He felt the burning trail it left down his throat.

‘Feeling it yet?’ Klaus asked, his mind a pleasant blur.

‘I’m not sure,’ Hans replied.

‘You’re a weird one,’ Klaus observed abruptly. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. When was the last time you laughed at a joke?’

‘I don't really like jokes.’

‘Then you must hate being around me. I don't think I've said one serious thing in my life.’

‘You...’ If Klaus had been any less drunk, he would have picked up on Hans’ sudden discomfort. ‘It's different with you.’

‘Well, shucks.’

After Hans had another mouthful of vodka and managed to stop Klaus from taking entire swigs from the bottle, they made their unsteady way back up the slope.

Towards the top, Klaus lost his footing. Hans’ quick reflexes prevented a precarious fall. He held Klaus up, helped him over the slope and the rest of the way down the path towards the boys' dorms, basking in the warm glow of usefulness.

‘You know,’ slurred Klaus, turning his head to look at Hans in profile, his smile still alive. ‘There’s not many people who could have stopped me from falling over.’

Hans felt a rare flicker of pride.

As they trudged slowly, Hans wondered if he was imagining that the atmosphere became slightly more serious. He looked sideways and was startled to meet a thoughtful, though still fairly drunken, gaze.

‘You shouldn't let them push you around, you know,’ said Klaus quietly. ‘You’re a big guy. You should fight them.’

Hans tried not to think about it.

‘It’s easier not to fight sometimes,’ he said quietly.

‘That's total crap.’

There was a pause.

‘How about if I teach you some moves?’

Klaus raised his right fist and tried to co-ordinate it with his left, which was still hanging off Hans’ shoulder. The ridiculous sight made Hans smile. He even chuckled.

Klaus was triumphant.

‘Hey, there it is! I knew you had a smile in you somewhere. You should do that more often, it suits you.’

The smile vanished immediately. His heart throbbed and Klaus’ weight, which was pleasantly bearable only moments ago, was suddenly too much. He was too close.

It felt like hours had lapsed by the time they staggered as quietly as possible up the stairs and into Klaus’ dorm. His roommate was away visiting family, Klaus told him, so Hans was welcome to stay there if he wanted.

Hans immediately said no.

Klaus barely seemed to hear him as he collapsed happily onto his bed. His eyes were closed and the ghost of his smile lingered.

Hans turned, fully intending to leave. At the doorway, he stopped.

He’d picked up on something. He _thought_ he’d picked up on something. It would be disastrous, beyond disastrous, if he was wrong. But if he was right…

His heart was pounding of its own accord.

* * *

Klaus couldn’t be sure if he’d nodded off for seconds or hours. When his eyelids flickered open in the darkness of his room again, he found himself staring at the outline of Hans’ face, his grey eyes startlingly clear even in the gloom, his hair falling low enough that it almost grazed Klaus’ cheeks.

‘What the f-?’

He lashed out instinctively.

He was too drunk to register exactly what happened but there was a heavy noise and Hans crying out in pain. Klaus lurched upright, the room spinning around him. Hans was sitting up on the floor against a toppled side table, his hand on the back of his neck, face contorted.

Even in his drunken state, it was easy for Klaus to remember how he was curled beside his bicycle as the older boys kicked him repeatedly in the stomach.

‘Shit. Fuck, Hans, I’m sorry.’

Focusing all his co-ordination, he got out of bed and pulled Hans to his feet. He was about to let go of his arms when the moonlight seeping between the curtains lit up Hans’ face. It was flushed. His eyes were… his eyes were something. Klaus couldn’t tell what. But it was enough that Klaus had forgotten to release him.

‘Let go,’ said Hans, eyes elsewhere. Klaus was shocked to see they were misted over.

‘Hans, I’m sorry,’ he repeated stupidly.

‘Let _go!_ ’

He’s tall, Klaus thought, his breathing suddenly ragged. Almost as tall as me.

Hans looked at him then. Like he was seeing through him. He stopped trying to pull away.

‘It’s okay,’ Hans said unexpectedly, his voice so quiet that Klaus barely heard him. ‘What you’re thinking. It’s okay.’

Klaus’ hands moved from Hans’ shoulders to his chest. Then his neck. His hands moved by themselves. Curious. Urgent. Dangerous. It was nothing like when he was with Greta, or any of the other girls. This was…

Hans was unable to move. Klaus’ look had gone from a drunken lack of focus to something new. Something fierce. His hands were rough and insistent. And then he was backed against the wall, right near the side table that he had fallen into, Klaus’ face inches from his, both breathing heavily, both unsure whether it was really happening.

And suddenly they were kissing. Klaus’ tongue invaded his mouth, the taste of vodka the loudest sensation of all. Hans felt as though he was being devoured. Like at any moment, Klaus would do something to break him. Like he’d unleashed something. It made him hard in seconds. Klaus’ hand was under his shirt, feeling its way up. And then down.

Neither could be sure what brought Klaus back to reality. But at some point he pulled away completely, stepping back and wiping his mouth.

Hans remained on the wall, trying to catch his breath.

Klaus stared at him. He felt, in perfect tandem, a wave of lust and a wave of nausea. He moved his hand to his forehead, hoping he was about to wake up.

And then, as though Hans had read his thoughts, his face crumpled.

‘I… I should go,’ he said in a small, low voice, though it appeared he’d forgotten how to move.

Klaus stumbled back towards his bed, feeling sick again.

‘Yeah, you should,’ was all he managed to say.

After an awful few seconds, Hans found his feet and left.

* * *

He didn’t see Hans in class for a few days after that. He entertained the vain hope that Hans had simply moved schools overnight and he would never have to face him again. He could barely look his friends in the eye. 

Greta was the one light in all of it. The day after the incident, she’d made fun of his obvious hangover and let him rest his head in her lap during their lunch break. She’s soft, he thought to himself.

A few days later, hours after the end of the school day, he and three friends from his team were heading back from practice. Ringing bicycle bells, a dusty football field.

And around the corner behind the locker room building, he saw them. The same boys. Beer bottles littering the floor. Cigarettes and untucked shirts. And a familiar shape on the ground between them, taking their beatings silently. Klaus stopped.

One of the boys noticed him and glanced up. The others did the same. The one with the broken nose remembered him only too well.

Klaus felt his teammates tense up next to him. He could tell that it wouldn’t even be a fight. They would just have to take a few steps in that direction and the other kids would run off with their tails between their legs.

But the flash of grey eyes beneath bruised lids had awakened something in Klaus. A nameless, suffocating thing he wasn’t prepared to face. Something he was simply too young to face.

And so he kept walking. A little confused, his teammates followed.

Hans watched him go and felt nothing at first. And then, when the beatings resumed, he felt the colours spreading throughout his body again. The same as always. Blue. Purple. Lime green, which meant he would bruise. Yellow, also. Like his hair in the sun when he scored that goal. And red.


	12. Hans' Colours and Klaus' Absence

For years, ever since he was first made commander of his division, Taki Reizen had envisioned many different outcomes of the war.

The earliest one, inspired by a sense of fatalism that he never let his men see, was where the war simply never ended. Where the nations would continue inventing more efficient and ingenious ways of destroying one another. He imagined himself and Klaus fighting for a lost cause until they lay dying of old age, passing on the mantle to the next generation, apologetic and tired.

He also imagined an ending where either he or Klaus would be killed in combat. He tried to mentally prepare for this, for the possibility that it could happen the very next day or a few years down the track. Where they stepped off stage before they got to see the culmination of the war. Where they would die ignorant of the fruit of their efforts.

In those reveries, Taki always harboured the awful, guilty hope that he was the one who was dead and that a grief-stricken Klaus would carry on; perhaps even carry them to victory on his behalf. This reverie was fuelled by Taki's inability to picture the alternative. The alternative where he would have to put on his uniform day after day and fight for a world that no longer had Klaus in it.

Another ending was where the war was over, where they both had survived but where Taki's country had lost. He tried not to imagine the shame that would fall like a shadow on his nation and his shoulders. But in this reverie, the large outline of Klaus would hover in that familiar corner of his mind. With a smile that occasionally managed to keep even the shame at bay. _Well, we lost,_ a low, rumbling voice would chuckle in his ear. _But we fucking gave them hell while we could, didn't we?_

Another ending, one he never allowed himself to indulge in too fully even during the final stages of the war, for fear of hubris or jinxes or inviting the wrath of the gods, was one where the war was over, where they’d both survived and where they'd won. And there, on the edges of his vision, on the other side of the sky, just as he'd wished aloud one day beneath the laburnums of Luckenwalde, he and Klaus might be able to fly somewhere together and leave everything behind at long last.

But one ending he never envisioned – an ending Taki simply didn't have the imagination for – was one where the war was over, where they'd both survived, where they'd won, and where Klaus was not there with him to see it happen.

* * *

Autumn was well underway. Every last tree had given in. The paths were strewn with crisp, dark leaves, flocks of which occasionally rushed to the ground from above without warning; a dry imitation of the laburnums and wisterias in other lands.

The compound, though still occupied, had attained a very specific state of stillness, as though it would give a tinny rattle if it were picked up and shaken. The soldiers, and indeed, the entire nation, were still coming to terms with the reality of peace. It would take a long while yet.

Only a week had passed. A week since the Fourteenth Armoured Division had gotten the aid it needed, since Ruttgenstein was utterly defeated and the Western Alliance issued a battle-weary surrender. A week since the end of the war.

The chancellor of Eurote, the stocky, oily-haired Adar Mussolin, had publicly acknowledged Taki. He called him an indispensable ally, a force to be reckoned with and a lifelong friend. He wore a grin that never reached his eyes, something Taki had seen before on the Eurotean Duchess. Watching the broadcast set Taki's teeth on edge. He heard the same oily voice on the phone and returned the gesture in clipped, formal tones.

The alliance Taki’s country shared with Eurote had always been strained at best (and only barely patched together since the fiasco with the Duchess). Taki hoped the end of the war meant the end of their having any more to do with one another. He hung up on Mussolin with the same relief he experienced when Murakumo blew apart their enemy's final line of resistance.

More than the broadcasts, the global news, the celebrations and the treaties, there was one definitive image that helped the soldiers and cadets of the Fifteenth Armoured Division to come to terms with the war being over. And that was the arrival of the emperor himself.

Dressed in the flowing, regal attire of his people, the emperor appeared to float through the room towards Taki, who felt immediately self-conscious about his uniform. He received the emperor in the main hall with all of his staff lined up according to rank.

Taki bowed low at the emperor’s feet. Most of his men, who had never before seen their commander kneel, felt the hushed veneration of witnessing an important moment in history.

With a crinkly-eyed gaze that offset his formal speech, Taki’s uncle acknowledged his role in their victory. He awarded Taki the Order of the Golden Kite, First Class, and a host of other honours.

Taki, however, was far more grateful for word about his sisters.

‘They’re all doing fine,’ the emperor assured him with a fatherly smile as they took a stroll through the leaf-strewn courtyard. The emperor’s attendants followed not far behind. ‘And, as usual, clamouring to see their favourite older brother. They threatened to stow away with me. In fact, they came dangerously close to doing exactly that.’

The emperor glanced sidelong at Taki and was somewhat surprised. He wondered if he’d ever seen his silent, serious, dedicated nephew smile before.

He mentioned that they also asked after the tall, golden-haired guardian spirit they’d once come across in the gardens. At this, Taki’s smile promptly fell away and he averted his eyes. The emperor didn't press him further.

Skilled in the subtle art of reading situations and rooms and people in general, the emperor also hesitated before asking about the new foreigner. The tall one with grey eyes and russet hair who had been standing not far from the commander’s seat in the main hall, his gaze serene and serious. Just as serene and serious, the emperor thought, as Taki himself. 

* * *

Though the emperor was correct in his belief that the golden-haired foreigner’s absence was weighing heavily on Taki, he didn’t know there was something weighing heavier on him still.

While Taki walked through the grounds, while he ate his meals alone, while he shook hands with dignitaries in front of flashing cameras, he found himself constantly thinking back to it.

A week earlier, the day after the Western Alliance had officially surrendered, Taki had learned Hans Regenwalde’s singular, unbelievable secret. The secret of Hans' unsettling omniscience. Something that had been bothering him in an out-of-focus way ever since they met.

This took place not long after Taki had hung up the phone with the Eurotean chancellor. Taki carried Mussolin’s voice and smile and vague feelings of alarm all the way up the stairs to Hans’ cell.

‘I see Adar Mussolin is on your mind, Commander,’ Hans said immediately as soon as Taki stepped into the cell and the guard closed the door. He was sitting on his bed and calmly set his book aside.

Taki was startled. ‘How did you know?’

He even flicked a glance at the door that had just closed. If Hans still had access to his spies, the only one who could viably have delivered information to Hans in such a short time was the guard.

‘The guard isn’t my spy,’ Hans said, his timing again beyond unnerving. ‘Though he is a nice enough fellow. We discussed the finer points of Wagner’s Fifth Symphony the other day.’

He then made a passing remark about his guesswork and his knowledge that the Euroteans had just broadcast their public appraisal of Taki. A phone call, he surmised, wouldn’t be far behind. Though still somewhat unsettled, Taki found himself taking a seat at Hans’ small desk and, before long, being drawn into politics.

Izumi Shunsuke, the frail media liaison who had first delivered news of the Western Alliance’s struggles on the home front, had explained to Taki in greater depth the situation in Eurote.

Adar Mussolin was trouble. It was he, after all, who initiated the war to begin with. He pulled multiple nations into a bitter struggle that lasted over a year. And while duty and honour, not to mention fear for his own country’s safety, compelled Taki to take his side, he now worried about the future.

Fascism. Lack of individuality. Lack of privacy. Lack of free speech. Vague threats that future wars would be necessary to expand and protect the Eurotean way of life. Taki’s worries heightened the more he read through the headlines Izumi fished out for him.

He spoke to Hans about all of it. He even divulged the details about the Duchess and Berkut and how they’d sought asylum from Eurote. From Mussolin. Of course it had all been part of a grander scheme to dethrone Taki, but their premise was still valid enough. Eurote was sinking further and further under the whims of a single man.

‘I don’t trust him. I never have. He’s hiding his dictatorship behind a thin veil. I worry about what it means for him now that he’s won. I get the feeling our victory may have made things worse for his people.’

There were a great deal of things, it seemed, that prevented Taki from taking any long lasting pleasure in their victory.

The way Klaus had looked at him before he left.

Taki mentally shook himself and tried to remember why he had come to see Hans in the first place.

‘Lieutenant General,' he began. 'While this country owes you a huge debt for everything you’ve done, I hope you understand why you’re officially still under arrest. We still need external confirmation that you are who you say you are. It may take a while before your organisation is able to surface and claim you as one of their own.’

‘Perfectly understandable.’

‘However, regardless of whether you’re an official POW or not, I’ve decided that I want you to be there with me when the emperor visits. Only if that’s agreeable to you, of course.’

Hans’ look of genuine surprise made Taki feel an unexpected surge of warmth.

‘I - of course. Thank you, Commander. I’d be honoured.’

‘It’s the least I can do to show you my gratitude.’

Hans then stared at Taki. The moment seemed to stretch itself into a taut, electric line. Taki’s pulse picked up.

* * *

‘If you’ll permit me,’ Hans finally said. ‘I would like to do something in return. In gratitude for your trust.’

Taki hesitated. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve asked me many times how I know the things I do. Things about the war, and the past. And you.’

He was going to reveal the names of his spies. Taki sat up a little straighter.

‘You won’t believe me at first,’ Hans said. He rose slowly, walked to the door and stood there silently for a beat or two, as if to hear for voices outside. ‘In fact, you won’t properly believe me for a long time.’

He then looked at Taki again and took a quick, deep breath.

‘Earlier, when you were talking about the future of Eurote. You were actually thinking about Klaus.’

Hearing his name caught Taki slightly off-guard.

‘You were thinking, specifically about the way Klaus looked at you before he left.’

And now, Taki was at a loss for words. He felt trapped in Hans’ gaze.

‘You had a fight,’ Hans continued. ‘Your worst one yet. You warned him that his abandonment would constitute a betrayal. He left anyway. He said a great deal of hurtful things. True things.’

‘How could you possibly –?’

Taki heard his voice shaking. _Th_ _ere’s something off about him, Taki,_ Klaus’ voice said. _He knows things he couldn’t possibly…_

‘And when you first came in, I knew you were thinking about Mussolin not because of guesswork.’

‘Then… then how –?’

And so Hans told him. He used very simple words. He explained it clearly and succinctly. And still Taki didn’t believe him. He couldn’t.

When Hans was done, he stood with his hands behind his back, watching Taki almost nervously.

From that point on, it was like a large, slender hand gently turned the world upside down and left it there.

* * *

The sheer impossibility, the bluntness of it, hung in the room between them.

Taki could only stare.

Hans hadn't made it sound like what it was. In fact he hadn’t used any strange words at all. And yet if what he was saying was true -

It conjured, for Taki, a different time. A time when men would turn into wolves. When a single touch could heal or when a whisper of wind carried meaning, carried words and thoughts from far away.

He would see these times often in dreams. Dreams wherein he was someone else, or someone he has once been, and he stood in a wind-swept field of grass. The very air would smell different. The powers of the gods weren't simply in the currents or the winds or the buds that turned to blossoms or the way in which wars were fought or the grandiose yet ineffable ways in which humanity's fate decided.

They were real. And they were everywhere. And Taki would wake from such dreams, even as a child, with a strange sense that they had all lost something precious.

The feeling of those dreams, the sense of something lost a long time ago, something that simply couldn't be anymore, not in these times, now enveloped him again as he stood in that makeshift holding cell before a man from the west who, up until a short time ago, had been a complete stranger.

He was still speaking. And Taki was still caught somewhere between worlds.

‘They’re more like colours,' Hans said softly. 'It’s a terrible, reductive way to describe it, but it’s the closest I can come. Like waves on a spectrum that others can’t access. Colour that morphs into feelings sometimes. Shapes and scenes other times. Words other times. It’s strange how often people think in words, in actual, flowing ink.’ He allowed himself a moment’s light-hearted introspection. ‘I encountered my greatest obstacle yet when I came here. Your countrymen think in kanji. Keeping up with the speed at which their thoughts progress, I fear, may take me decades.’

The impossibility began to sink into Taki in little shards, one tiny fragment at a time.

‘I can only pick up on things that are the strongest, most vivid colours. Things that have happened in people’s pasts that they hold onto. Things that are forefront in someone’s mind at the time they talk to me.’

 _It’s simple,_ Klaus had said, taking Taki’s hand beside the train. _Take me with you. You just have to make me yours._

‘I found out what I could about this ability without revealing myself. I’ve honed it. I know how physically close I need to be to pick up on a reading. I know it oftentimes takes eye contact, though not always. I know how to push conversations so that people are forced to visualise answers that they may not divulge but which I can see. I’ve even made a small fortune out of it, which is still waiting for me back home. But ultimately, when the war broke out, I felt it was my duty to use this… whatever you call it… to help bring the fighting to an end.’

Such a measured, deadpan voice. And gaze. Hans could have said anything in the world and it would have sounded reasonable.

‘That’s… remarkable,’ Taki finally heard himself say, though he was nowhere close to believing him. The feeling that accompanied dreams of times long past only came to him in the small hours. In that room, he was awake.

Hans smiled almost sadly.

‘It didn’t seem that way at first. You would be horrified, Taki-sama, at the depth and frequency of human duplicity. People whose cheerful, benevolent actions are actually the diametric opposite of the depth of evil they harbour. It’s shocking. It _was_ shocking, at any rate. I’m used to it now.’

For Taki, the simple truth of this comprised only another thin layer of startled disbelief.

‘You and Klaus are among the only exceptions I’ve ever come across,’ Hans continued. ‘Everything you are on the outside reflects all you are within.’

Taki thought about the last time he’d seen Klaus. All the things Taki wanted to say but couldn’t. It certainly didn’t seem that way.

‘I’ve come across so few people in my life who are true both outside and in that I’ve always been drawn to them. It was Klaus in the beginning. And you now. I’ve had to wade through so much staggering hypocrisy and evil. Forgive the cliché, but until I reached my twenties, my gift far more resembled a curse.’

There was a small pause where a few moments from the past few weeks swam to the front of Taki's mind.

‘So... when you said you knew my men were planning to kill you in your cell. And that the book saved Klaus’ life. And –’

Taki’s heart leapt to his throat.

_I’m curious. Does anyone else here have any idea about the nature of your relationship with your knight?_

Everything.

Their room in Luckenwalde, the train, Taki’s room, Klaus’ shed. It was always on Taki’s mind, at the very least in the background. And how often had it swum into the foreground, especially during those times when Taki furiously wished it would go away?

Was it possible that Hans had seen it all?

Even being stripped and laid bare in front of Klaus didn’t compare to how Taki felt under that clear gaze. He felt the immediate urge to –

‘Please don’t go,’ Hans said suddenly, and Taki experienced the surreal shock of wondering if he’d heard, or seen, even that last thought. ‘You’re the first person with whom I’ve ever shared this with. Like this, anyway. I scared my parents and handlers enough in my earliest years to have never spoken of it again.’

Taki swallowed. Hans had the presence of mind to keep his eyes on the corner as he asked. He willed his pulse to settle. To see clearly. His mouth had gone dry.

Warily, as though he’d taken Taki’s continued presence as encouragement, Hans spoke to the floor.

‘You have nothing to be ashamed of, Taki-sama,’ he said, sounding as though he were treading on eggshells. ‘After all, I’m in no position to judge you on that count.’

Their gazes met and Hans smiled thinly.

‘I can see you know what happened that night ten years ago. I’m not sure if it owes to Klaus’ description or if you’re just good at filling in the blanks. Either way, what you’re picturing is a surprisingly accurate version of what took place in Klaus’ dorm room.’

Despite all the impossible thoughts whirling about his head, Taki blushed then. It wasn’t even his own memory and yet he felt ashamed.

‘We were young. Klaus was scared. And disgusted. Seeing those emotions, almost feeling them as if they were my own…’ Hans’ voice was quiet. ‘It affected me for a lot longer than I care to admit.’

His eyes were back on Taki.

‘But what he felt for you was… pure. It was overwhelmingly pure. He just wanted you.’

Pure? Taki had never once associated purity with how Klaus felt for him. In fact -

_And then one day I find out… that I’ve defiled something. That I’ve ruined you._

As soon as the memory surfaced, Hans saw it too. This time, Taki picked up on it. He recognised that look on Hans’ face; the unblinking, intent eyes, the flash of uncanny understanding. He’d seen it many times before when they talked about the war, or the past. Or Klaus.

And he knew in that moment. Irrevocably. It was the kind of certainty that was so insistent that it erased any trace of doubt. And before he even absorbed it fully, Taki stood up abruptly and rapped on the door to be let out. Hans didn’t try to stop him.

* * *

Although Hans was confident that Taki would be back, he didn't expect it would take only a handful of hours. Night had fallen over the grounds outside.

Taki’s gaze was downcast. When the hem of his coat settled around his shins, his entire body was still. He was beautiful, Hans thought again. Like an artist's life-sized rendering of nobility and youth.

‘I apologise, Taki-sama,’ Hans said carefully. ‘I overloaded you. I understand if you don’t believe me. I certainly wouldn’t believe me.’

Crickets chirped urgently from the grounds below.

‘And I understand if you want to retract your offer of allowing me to be present when the emperor visits. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable if –'

‘No,’ said Taki. ‘You – I would still appreciate if you were there.’

Hans hadn't expected that. ‘Thank you, Commander.’

There was a significant pause. Hans waited.

When Taki lifted his eyes, the steely determination in his expression told Hans what was about to happen.

Taki had slowly lined up the questions. The tests. He constructed gentle mazes that gave way to elaborate ones. He changed track at the speed of light, with deft mental aerobics that Hans almost struggled to keep up with. His simple, incredibly effective skills left Hans astounded. It was as though Taki had had years to come to terms with Hans’ gift. To test it for lies and weaknesses.

Even without my help, Hans realised, Taki Reizen would have won the war eventually.

‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered under his breath when Taki was done.

Hans, of course, had passed each and every test. So Taki, feeling light-headed again, could only reciprocate.

He sat back down at Hans’ desk, idly reflecting on the fact that a great number of momentous things had happened in that walk-in closet turned holding cell.

‘You said they were like colours?’ Taki eventually said, sounding winded.

A slight pause.

‘That’s as close as I can get,’ repeated Hans.

Taki heard the relief in Hans’ tone. The gratitude. It was the first thing that came close to grounding him.

* * *

They spoke for hours. And hours.

It was well past midnight by the time Taki decided he should retire lest he fall asleep at Hans’ desk.

It was strange for them both. For Taki to know that he just needed to say a few words, really no words at all, before Hans could intuit the rest. For Hans to know that Taki knew and nevertheless let him read it all. Before long, they fell into an uncanny but flowing rhythm. Possibly the first such conversation to ever take place, Hans realised.

They were also surprised at the fact that Hans met almost no resistance. It was as though Taki had spent enough of his life fighting and was willing to succumb to another, let them in entirely without raising his guard, for the very first time.

And so everything poured from him like floodwaters in a deluge. His regrets, his guilt, his fears. It was almost all Klaus, Hans quickly realised. He wondered whether Klaus knew just how much of the commander’s thoughts went to him. How frequently and how deeply.

But there were other things. The river Taki had fallen into as a child. The weight of an entire country on his shoulders. The impossible vows that he had undertaken and broken time and time again.

Hans listened, and read, more than he spoke.

When he did speak, he offered both sympathy and piercing insight.

‘Only you can resolve it, Taki-sama,’ said Hans. ‘You’re in a truly unique position. In history. In politics. Even in your family. Whether in your role as commander or political leader, whether in this past war or the next, whatever course of action you take will be the first of its kind. It’s a heavy responsibility. I, and others like me, can only ever offer you advice and support in the knowledge that the burden is yours alone.’

It had taken months, Taki thought, but then again, it had really only taken hours. Whatever the case, in that moment he felt closer to Hans Regenwalde than he had to anyone else in his life.

* * *

At two in the morning, when his eyes began to ache with fatigue, Taki bade Hans goodnight. With the odd sensation like he was tethered but still floating, he approached the door. He paused with his hand in mid-air.

‘I’ve never asked him,’ Taki said suddenly. ‘You asked me once if I’ve ever asked him what it’s like to have given everything up for me. I’ve always been too afraid to know the answer.’

Hans sensed, and then read, that Taki had spent most of the night working his way up to asking his next question. He turned. His eyes were both guilty and imploring.

‘And now, especially after what he said, I…’

‘You worry that he regrets ever binding himself to you?’

There was a long, important silence.

‘Do you think he does?’

Taki's words barely rose above the sound of the crickets outside.

‘I don’t know.’

Taki wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed; whether he was secretly hoping that Hans had somehow picked up on it over the months. All he knew was that he was looking for something to dispel the hollowness and uncertainty where Klaus used to be.

Hans continued, with a touch more confidence, ‘But when he comes back –‘

‘ _If_ he comes back,’ Taki interrupted in a low voice, surprising even himself. At this rate, Hans wouldn’t even have to read his mind.

‘When he comes back,’ Hans corrected again, gently but firmly. ‘I can find out for you.’

* * *

Long after Taki had left and Hans snapped his bedside lamp off, he fancied he could still smell flowers. The scent seemed to float like a cloud during and after every one of his interactions with the commander.

He breathed deeply.

Lying back in bed, he stared at the twinkling sky beyond the window. He remembered how, earlier that day, he’d watched high-hanging clouds being slowly pulled apart by invisible hands, bleeding red and orange on the edges in the light of the setting sun.

He then replayed a memory that wasn’t his. A memory that he had pieced together over the months simply by seeing it in both Klaus and Taki. It was rather moving, he thought with a smile, how often they both recalled that moment. How intensely they still felt it to that day. How meticulously they turned over the precise feelings and the details. He doubted they’d ever admit it to one another.

It was the memory of their final night together in Luckenwalde.

_How long do you plan to follow me?_

_Until you go back to our room._

Murmurs beneath the laburnums. Klaus asking about the purple flowers that fluttered in the breeze of Taki’s homeland. Klaus, again mistaking Taki’s honour for naivety, trying to drive home the reality of war, if only in an attempt to make his offer, his simple cottage with the roses, seem slightly more realistic. Taki’s outburst, his fiery patriotism, his unbending sense of duty. Taken aback, Klaus feels it again; the stirrings of something dangerous.

_Can I sit next to you?_

Taki’s heartbeat picks up irrationally. He nods. He feels guilty again. Klaus isn't to know how much his closeness means to him.

Which is why _I want to kiss you_ catches him so off guard. Shock and guilt are foremost, of course. But Hans can see beneath that to something more potent. Relief. Happiness. Even excitement. Is such a thing even possible? Is it possible that the heretic, depraved feelings Taki has been fighting for the past year are not only real but also _reciprocated?_

As if in response, Klaus’ lips are on his for the very first time. In fact, it’s the first time anyone has ever been that close. It’s suffocating and overwhelming and strange. And Taki willingly flips his hand over, feeling Klaus’ huge palm press his against the bed. He doesn’t know what would happen next but it would be fine, anything would be fine, if it was Klaus.

Klaus.

Klaus.

Taki’s lips are softer than he imagined. And his scent is everywhere. Klaus loses his mind in it for the first time. The first of many, Hans thought. He’s pushing Taki back onto the bed, slipping his tie away from his collar to the floor, unbuttoning his shirt.

_Is this the first time you’ve been touched?_

Klaus’ hair falls forwards as he hangs above Taki.

_No one's kissed your lips?_

His tongue and lips. Hot, insistent. Taki says his name once.

_Or heard your voice?_

And then, when Klaus’ hand is there, _there,_ exactly where the need is most urgent, Taki can’t hold back. He says his name again as though he can’t remember any other words. And he comes into Klaus’ hand for the first time.

Klaus’ mind is seared with the image of Taki’s arms reaching up, eyes brimming, his own name on Taki’s lips. At that moment, love takes him in one swift embrace and doesn't let go again. He can only pull Taki close until his climax ebbs. Klaus feels, and Hans felt, disbelieving gratitude that he was allowed to be there as well as the fear that he was holding something so delicate that he might break it at any moment.

And suddenly Klaus is fifteen again and Taki is nine. Only Hans knew, a year after the fact, that they both thought of the scene beneath the wisteria at the same time.

 _You have golden eyes,_ said young Taki, held aloft in the stranger’s strong arms. _If only you were my knight._

* * *

Hans opened his eyes. The gloom of his cell pressed all around him. He turned on his side to face the window.

He had long since made peace with the intrusiveness of his gift. In a world that had given him so little, he considered it his way of taking something for himself. He considered them _his_ memories as much as they were Klaus and Taki’s.

Filled with them, and trying to hold onto the scent of flowers, he drifted off.

* * *

A week later, as he walked beside the emperor and talked about his sisters, Taki’s mind was still full of Hans’ colours and Klaus’ absence. The sun peeked out from behind the autumn chill and warmed the grounds. Taki wondered how far off summer was even though he knew full well they only just left it behind.

The emperor's thoughts, meanwhile, still lingered on the tall, grey-eyed foreigner. Something about him had struck the emperor. He tried to identify whether his feelings about him were benign or… otherwise. He was further struck by the fact that his intuition, which had rarely let him down, was unable to deliver an answer.

‘Taki,’ the emperor said gently. ‘That westerner I saw in the reception hall. Is he –?’

But the emperor never got to finish his question. At that moment, a red-faced soldier rushed to them, bowing hurriedly and awkwardly to the emperor and the commander alike and trying in his blustering way to both apologise for the unforgivable interruption and deliver an urgent report.

Even before the private managed to get the words out, Taki felt like he was on the edge of a crevasse.

And then he heard it. Two pieces of news, both of which he failed to grasp immediately.

The first was that Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt had returned to the compound moments ago.

The second was that he had shot Major Uemura in the chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I know, I know, wtf Hans is psychic, right? When I came up with this story sometime at the end of last year it actually started with Hans - I built the entire story around him and his power. Given all of Taki and Klaus' problems communicating with one another, Hans' ability was something I thought would either drive a wedge between them or bring them together. Obviously none of the latter so far.
> 
> Because of this unexpected break from canon, combined with the fact that we're heading further into the darker parts of the story (yes it actually gets worse, even when the war is over) I think I might hold off on chapter-by-chapter updates until I'm done with Part 1 in entirety (which will be another 5 chapters). That way it won't be endless weeks of angst before the happy ending. So it might be a while before the story gets updated again, sorry about that! Hope you guys understand.
> 
> I just want to say thank you so much to everyone, the commenters and kudosers and subscribers, for having been so amazing and having stuck by this story. Your support means more than I can say. Hope to see you all again in a while!!


	13. Settle It, By My Own Hand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! So when I said five chapters last time, apparently I meant nine! (Knowing when to shut up has never been my strong suit.) I don't want my subscribers to wake up to an onslaught of email updates, so (new plan!) I’ll just post up a few chapters at a time every few days when I’m done editing/polishing them. I know that’s still a lot of annoying emails but I hope that’s better than nine at once!
> 
> And also hope you guys enjoy the rest of Part 1! Again, please bear with the angst and the dark turn of events in the next few chapters. I’ll see you in my author’s note at the end of Chapter 21 :)
> 
> PS: Doubt anyone will notice but there are some lines in Chap 13 and 14 that I ripped off one of my other stories (the crossover with Saezuru where Taki wonders what it would have been like if someone else had been his knight). Like he’s done with a few other things, Hans took those lines for himself.

‘It was an accident.’

The hollow words echoed in the cell.

‘You shot him in the chest,’ said Taki, his tone icy.

‘It was an accident!’ Even though he'd tried to prepare himself and his defence before Taki arrived, Klaus was already beginning to lose focus. The look on Taki’s face. ‘Ask anyone who was there. I was aiming for Hans. Uemura came out of nowhere –’

‘Why were you aiming for Hans?'

‘Is he – is Uemura...?’

Klaus’ voice was constricted. Taki threw him a withering look through the bars before answering.

‘He's fighting for his life in the infirmary. Suguri's doing all he can. We won't know for a while.’

Klaus turned and walked a few aimless steps away, hand in his hair. His left arm, still in bandages but no longer in a sling, started to throb.

‘Why were you aiming for Hans?’ Taki asked again, tone unchanged.

‘Why did he have to get in the way?’

The words came through clenched teeth.

Klaus remembered it happening in neat, simple steps. First, he brought his bike to a stop in front of Taki's building. He discovered once inside that there was no one in the holding cell that had once been a walk-in. He then sprinted to the reception hall where officers, all dressed in their best, were filing out one by one. And there, a snake in their midst, was Hans. Even though he was still closely tailed by his guard, who seemed to be walking him back in the direction of his cell, it almost seemed as though he'd been one of them for years.

Klaus strode past officers, knocking a few of them aside, and drew out his gun as he approached.

Hans saw him at the same moment that Uemura, who was nearby, called out Klaus' name in shock.

In honour of the emperor, who was currently taking a walk with Taki somewhere on the grounds, none of the officers had brought any weapons to the reception hall.

Major Uemura's thoughts in that moment were threefold. The first was that he needed to prevent a scene during the emperor's landmark visit. The second was that he needed to protect the man, untrustworthy foreigner though he was, in whom the commander had recently seemed to place so much trust. And without whom, Uemura suspected, the war would still be raging. And thirdly, though he couldn't quite admit it to himself, there was also fear for Wolfstadt himself; if he were to kill Regenwalde in that moment, in a place surrounded by officers, Uemura worried about the consequences that would await him.

And so he'd stepped in front of Hans, his hand outstretched, hoping to talk some sense into Wolfstadt.

He didn't know what Klaus had found out about Hans over the past week. He hadn't counted on Klaus' single-minded drive and focus.

The only divine grace lent to the situation was the fact that Klaus only fired once before the image in front of him caught up. He'd been planning to shoot many times, as many times as it took, until Hans was on the ground and not moving. But when Uemura sprang in front of Hans, when the gun fired and Uemura buckled, Klaus froze and his hand immediately fell to his side. He didn't even get a chance for the shock to sink in before several officers tackled him to the ground. Hasebe himself wasted no time coming to his side and overseeing the arrest.

‘I'm sorry,’ Klaus heard himself say. He turned to Taki again. ‘I didn’t mean to. If I had seen him in time I –’

‘I won't ask again,’ Taki interrupted. ‘Why did you try to kill Hans?’

Klaus tried to collect his thoughts. Guilt, he realised, not for the first time, is the hardest thing to bear. Worse even than grief or jealousy.

Before the bars, Taki was flanked by two privates. Hasebe had reluctantly left the cell after Taki dismissed him, but he had taken the keys to Klaus’ cell with him and told his guards to remain with the commander as if Klaus was a dangerous, unrestrained animal. It didn’t escape Klaus that Hasebe had thrown him in the same cell that had once held Hans.

Wondering if he was caught in a dream that was part absurdity and part nightmare, he tried to focus on the past week.

‘I went to meet someone,’ he said finally.

* * *

The town was small, dusty and nondescript, like most forgettable towns on the border of any nation. Klaus leaned against the wall of the alley, coat collar turned up against an increasingly bitter wind. Just beyond was the main street where a few straggling passers-by were rushing home for the evening, faces blank.

Each sigh was a puff of steam that rose above his head and disappeared. Klaus’ back and legs still ached from hours on the bike. It had taken him nearly a full day to arrive at the town. After that he’d spent three days just trying to track down the old man.

None of his old accomplices were forthcoming. They suspected that Klaus had abandoned the West for good. That something had changed in him. Klaus wondered if he was giving off some kind of scent. (At that he’d grinned a little. Perhaps he smelled like flowers too, now.) After spending nights in cheap inns and spending days trying to gather information off old countrymen who slammed their doors in his face or slammed down the phone, Klaus finally hit on a sympathiser. A phone number was given tersely, angrily, probably in the hope that Klaus would never try to make contact again. So he rang and the old man had answered.

After Klaus explained what he could, he begrudgingly told Klaus to wait there. That he’d be there in around three days’ time.

While he waited, Klaus considered going back to Taki. It would take a full day by bike and then a full day to return and meet the old man. Enough time to apologise to Taki for everything he’d said. To explain what he was doing.

Hell, he could even pick up the phone at any time and call the Fifteenth Armoured Division, ask to be put through to the commander and hear that clear, low voice say his name. Klaus would try to explain himself in his broken, stupid way. It would be a start.

No, he decided. It would be exactly that; broken and stupid. Klaus had to return with something useful. With some kind of proof that his feelings about Hans Regenwalde weren’t just fuelled by jealousy. Without that, he wasn’t deserving of seeing Taki again. Nor of hearing his voice.

While standing in the alley, he clenched and unclenched his left fist. The pain in his arm had lessened a great deal. He experimentally undid his sling and flexed his bandaged arm. Not bad.

Footsteps. And then the old man came around the corner. He was as heavyset as ever, brow furrowed beneath the cap, downturned mouth.

‘Been a while, old man,’ said Klaus, tossing the sling aside.

‘I can’t believe I’m back here,’ he grumbled, sounding like he had a cold. ‘The war might be over but they’re still weeding out spies. I must be out of my mind.’

 _Or you still have a crush on me_ , Klaus thought, almost on the point of saying it out loud. Then he remembered his joke hadn’t landed too well last time.

‘At least it’s not just morphine I’m after this time,’ he said instead.

‘You think I’d travel for three days just to bring you drugs?’

The old man reached into his carry case and drew out a single blurry photograph.

‘I warned you over the phone. All the records have been destroyed. This is all I could find. It’s pretty much nothing.’

Klaus took the photo from him.

‘Really stupid that you'd ask about this kind of thing stuff over phone, you know,’ the old man added.

He was right; the photo revealed next to nothing. It showed only Hans Regenwalde along with his second- and third-in-command, Liedermann and Straffberg, exiting a building. They were surrounded by other military personnel; westerners all of them.

‘That was taken in Eurote a few months ago.’

‘Eurote?’

Klaus had heard Chancellor Mussolin on radios throughout the town. He heard him praise Taki's name, which had cut through him for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. There was something there he wasn’t quite seeing. He pushed it away for now and tried to focus on Hans.

The old man stamped his feet to keep the cold away.

‘When they were seen in Eurote, the Western Alliance suspected them of being spies and traitors. The Brass then discovered a huge network working to bring down the Alliance by joining sides with the enemy.’

‘Regenwalde already told us all that. Taki even sent his own spies to confirm it.’

‘What Reizen doesn't know is that the Brass intercepted one of their conversations. On one of the rare occasions that they slipped up and our surveillance worked.’

‘What did they hear?’ asked Klaus, his heart rate picking up.

‘Some kind of plan to bring down the Reizens.’

The wind hurtled through the alley.

‘What?’

‘My source in the Brass was nervous as hell and sketchy on the details. The network that Regenwalde is part of. Apparently they were planning to infiltrate and then take down the entire Reizen leadership from the inside. On their own terms, without the Alliance’s knowledge.’

Klaus’ mind raced. ‘Why didn't the Brass stop them?’

‘Are you kidding? It would’ve sounded like a gift from God to our guys on top. Sure, the network was operating outside the Brass' control but it sounded like the best way to win the war. Our side let them do what they wanted. Raids, infiltrations, whatever. We turned a blind eye.’

Klaus thought about the raid authorised by the Western Alliance that threw Hans in their midst.

‘After that, the Brass waited for the moment that the Reizens would fall. It didn't happen. And then we lost the whole damn war. Our guys on top definitely didn't see that coming.’

He grunted and rubbed his jaw.

‘I’ve been thinking about it on the train ride over here. I can’t figure out for sure what happened. The fact that the Reizens are not only alive and well but the fact that they actually won the fucking war... My source thinks maybe Regenwalde and the network failed. Or even changed their fucking minds. Like hell they did.’

‘Sounds like you have your own theory.'

‘I think they're still working on it. I know it doesn't make sense now that the war’s over but this kind of network, this kind of elaborate scheme... there's something bigger here. I think they're still waiting to strike.’

There was a tense pause.

‘I don't know why, or under whose authority they'd be working, but that's the hunch I'm getting. And I've been playing this game a long time.’

_They're still waiting to strike._

A snake slithering around the paws of a black cat.

‘I need –’ Klaus began, a familiar hatred welling, now peppered with urgency. ‘I need something that proves this. I need more than a blurry photo that shows nothing. Old man –’

‘I told you. Someone's wiped the records clean. No evidence of that interception. And I’m too tired to try to figure out who cares enough to make sure those records were wiped.’

Partly out of tired suspicion, partly out of curiosity, the old man took in Klaus' tension.

‘Why do you care so much anyway? We lost. None of it matters anymore.’ He then hesitated before saying, ‘And you know, if my hunch is right, once the Reizens are all dead you can drop your knight charade and go back home. Won't even matter that our side lost. You’ll be free.’

Before he let the words register properly, Klaus glanced once more at Hans' inscrutable gaze in the photo, folded it up and slid it into his coat pocket.

‘Old man,’ he replied. ‘If I tried to explain all the things that were wrong in what you just said, we'd need several hours and a bottle of scotch.’

Despite the words, Klaus didn't crack a smile. He suddenly seemed lost, the old man thought. Like he didn't know his next move.

‘How the hell am I supposed to stop him?’ he muttered, largely to himself. ‘Taki will never believe me. And if I kill Regenwalde with my bare hands he’ll never forgive me.’

The old man blinked in confusion.

‘For God’s sake, Wolfstadt. Do you even know which side you’re on anymore?’

Klaus finally looked at him properly and gave a short, humourless laugh.

‘That’s the _only_ fucking thing I’m sure of.’

The old man stared, his vague, long-held suspicions confirmed. He tried to understand what the captain had been through over the past year. Klaus had once likened him to his own father; a comparison that hadn’t been far off the mark. The old man had always had a soft spot for the reckless, careening Wolfstadt whose constant, shit-eating smile always seemed, to him at least, to hide his capacity for a mysterious depth of emotion. Maybe even sorrow, if the old man was feeling dramatic enough.

He sighed. At that moment, his past life as a western spy along with his increasing apathy over the state of world affairs gave way to something else.

‘Then you need to go back as soon as you can,’ he said, surprised at the change in his own voice. ‘If there's any truth to any of this, something’s coming. Reizen’s in danger the longer Regenwalde is still alive and near him.’

The eyes that met his were both piercing and imploring.

‘Taki won’t listen to me. Not if I bring him only rumours.’

‘Then take matters into your own hands. Isn’t that what you’ve always done?’

Long after the old man boarded the train back to his country, he replayed his own words in his mind. He hoped he’d given the reckless, careening Wolfstadt the right advice.

* * *

Silence reigned in the holding cell after Klaus stopped talking. 

‘You were prepared to kill someone in cold blood on the hunch of an old Western Alliance spy?’

Although Klaus had expected that very reaction, his hopes plummeted.

‘Not… not just his hunch. There were records. They may have been wiped, but...’ The weakness and desperation of his words were only too easy to hear. ‘What if it’s true Taki? What if they’re still planning something?’

Taki sighed in frustration.

‘We won, Klaus. Nothing can prove Hans’ allegiance more than everything he’s done to help us win. The war’s over.’

‘Taki –’

‘Maybe that hasn't sunk in because you weren't here when it ended.’

Even the two soldiers who flanked the commander heard the new edge that had crept into his voice.

‘You left before the final battle. When I expressly told you not to. How could you do that?’

_Because there was no point in winning the war if it meant losing you._

Klaus was on the point of saying it. But he didn’t. He didn’t know how Taki would react if he told him that he put anything above winning the war.

‘I had to stop you from trusting Hans. I know I haven’t proved it yet, but he’s dangerous, Taki. You have to believe me.’

‘He’s not the reason Uemura’s in the infirmary.’

The damning silence was interrupted by a private who entered and saluted. Taki turned to look at him.

Klaus found himself watching how Taki’s hair moved and settled during that small act.

‘Apologies for the interruption, Taki-sama. The emperor is just preparing to depart.’

After a charged exchange of glances and the hem of Taki's coat whipping around the corner, Klaus found he was almost relieved to be left alone. The look on Taki's face, he thought again.

The beginnings of winter seeped through the barred window. He blew air out of his cheeks and sat down on the narrow cot. Neither the chill nor the damp nor the rickety cot bothered him. He’d be out of there soon enough, he knew. What happened after that though, he thought, was anyone’s fucking guess.

* * *

Hasebe was waiting immediately outside the holding cell. When Taki drew up to him, he handed Taki Klaus' gun and a blurry, folded-up photo; the only things he had on his person when they arrested him.

Taki stared at the innocuous image of Hans and a few other soldiers exiting a building. In Eurote, according to Klaus’ report.

Hans had never mentioned that he'd been in Eurote.

And Taki had waited over a week. There had still been no confirmation from Hans' network of spies. No one had surfaced to claim Hans as one of their own.

A shadow of doubt formed in his mind. He handed the both photo and gun back to Hasebe.

‘Any word on the major's condition?’

‘About the same.’

‘Second-Lieutenant Suguri has pulled off miracles before,’ Taki said, thinking of how he'd saved Hans.

It was a bright, cold afternoon. Birds held noisy congress in trees whose brown leaves were now falling off, revealing grey, skeletal innards. The bitter cold of the following season crouched around the corner. A full year, Taki thought, since the war began. Since he’d brought Klaus with him to this country for the first time.

‘Taki-sama,’ Hasebe began gruffly. ‘I told you before that if there was ever a next time with Wolfstadt –’

‘And I told you that if that were ever the case, I would be the one settle it. You're not to touch him without my authority. Do you understand?’

His tone and expression inspired in Hasebe the same sense of diminishment that Klaus had felt only moments ago.

‘Yes, sir.’

* * *

The Imperial Guard lined the driveway leading out of the main gate, some mounted and others on foot. The cars in the motorcade were spotless and glinting fiercely in the sun. Banners rippled in the wind. Reporters tried to get a few shots of the royal scene through the gate.

The emperor himself waited for Taki in a small, private courtyard that adjoined his ground-floor chamber. He was hoping to have one final word with his nephew. The tumultuous return of the golden-haired foreigner, the one Taki had long ago appointed his knight, had disturbed him somewhat. He almost felt guilty for leaving in the midst of it all.

‘Your Grace. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’

Taki stood in the chamber doorway awaiting permission to enter the courtyard. The emperor beckoned him forwards. He was sitting on a stone bench by a small green pond. An attendant had gathered and folded his robes neatly on the floor before him.

‘Is everything okay, Taki?’ he asked, indicating that Taki sit beside him.

Hesitating first, bowing low second, Taki sat beside his uncle.

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

His answer was wrote and automatic. The emperor sensed it.

‘You seem to have a lot on your mind. And so soon after the end of the war, it hardly seems fair.’

Surrounding the stone bench and pond was a network of square flower beds. The roses, however, had flown south for the winter.

‘The Reizen name is a heavy one to bear,’ the emperor continued in his gentle, undulating way. ‘You won’t find many others who share it.’ His smile was slight but it managed to take up his whole face. ‘So I urge you to make use of me while you can.’

Taki looked at him. Again, he saw a great deal of his own mother in the emperor’s eyes. In the soft line of his mouth. And even in that gaze which seemed to see beyond what was in front of him. A gentler omniscience, Taki thought, than Hans’.

There were a thousand things he would have liked to bring up. But, despite the emperor’s generosity, he knew they didn’t have all the time in the world.

So he spoke to him of the one thing he couldn’t speak to anyone else about.

‘Uncle,’ he said, a word he hadn’t used since childhood. ‘Have you heard of those with a sixth sense?’

‘Sixth sense?’

Taki hesitated again, aware of how it sounded. He tried to explain it in a way that wouldn't reveal Hans' secret, aware that it was coming out broken and ridiculous. He tried to remember how Hans had explained it to him.

As he spoke, the emperor's eyebrows steadily lifted. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting but it certainly wasn’t this.

‘Telepaths?’ he summarised.

Taki remained silent.

The emperor took a moment to consider it. ‘We were taught about them in scripture, as I recall.’

‘What were you taught?’

‘Well, if you believe legend, they once existed in large numbers. Alongside those with different powers - the power to heal and shapeshift and so on. This was during a time when we were closer to the gods and the gods, in turn, were a lot more willing to share their gifts. That time is long past, obviously.’

A brief pause where Taki stared at his shoes.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘If such a person can exist – today, I mean – what… how would they function? What would they do with their gift?’ Taki tried to find the words. ‘Would they even be able to see the world the same way we do?’

The emperor wondered how best to answer his nephew’s esoteric questions. His eyes rested on the rows of small brass plaques in the empty flower beds, either mourning the loss of the roses or promising their eventual return.

‘In our day and age,’ he said eventually, ‘a gift like that from the gods of old would be a heavy burden. I can’t begin to imagine the mistrust and isolation they would have experienced from an early age. Not to mention, in the case of the telepath, the unbearable secret of knowing the truth of the human mind, which even when filtered is a volatile, unfathomable entity. I can’t imagine they could ever see the world the way we do.’

Taki hesitated.

‘Can people like that ever really be trusted?’

The emperor observed him closely, wondering if he was prepared to believe what he’d read between the lines. It didn’t seem likely that Taki was asking purely for the sake of a theoretical discussion.

Was such a thing, then, possible?

If it was, he decided after a moment of introspection, then it was also possible that such a person would seek out others who shared the gods’ grace. He would be drawn to the Reizen name like a bee to a flower.

 _The one with the yellow hair,_ the emperor wondered, _or the one with the red?_

He weighed his next words.

‘If such a gift has somehow survived the ages, imagine the impact it would have if just one person were to lend them a kind ear. Without judgment. With an open heart and mind. It might even change the course of history.' He then considered the hypothetical in slightly more depth. ‘At the same time, we must be mindful of their true potential. There’s no telling what might happen when someone with sight is thrown into the world of the blind.’

Something small and invisible fell from the sky and left a tiny indent in the surface of the pond.

‘Be wary, Taki,’ the emperor finished, divining that Taki needed to hear age-old advice in the face of something new and unpredictable.

* * *

At that moment, Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde lay in bed in his cell, trying to distinguish between feelings of loyalty and those of love.

He wondered whether there was any real distinction. What kind of love it was. What it meant for loyalty. What it meant, above all, for the job he had yet to do. They were questions that not even his gift could help him with.

And so when there was a familiar rap on his door and the young commander entered, Hans tried to analyse, to categorise and label, the specific surge he felt in his gut when his eyes landed on Taki's obsidian hair and eyes. The strength of his posture. The still line of his mouth. It was a strange sensation that spread through Hans swiftly from a fixed point.

He had only experienced it once before. A long time ago.

The commander was preoccupied. Hans, of course, immediately knew why.

He made quick work of the information with which Taki confronted him. The photo and an old man’s theories. They did go to Eurote for recon, Hans confirmed. To see whether they ought to take their next step there or in Taki’s country; to determine the most strategic place for them to help defeat the Western Alliance. And the suspicious old man was just that; a suspicious old man, bitter that his country had lost the war. There was nothing more to it.

 _Be wary, Taki._ Hans saw the small grey cloud of suspicion that still lingered. But for the most part, Taki believed him. Klaus, after all, had made it easy for him to.

They didn’t speak again as Taki led him down the stairs and across the grounds. Halfway to the holding cells, Taki dismissed the guard. Hans also couldn’t help but notice that handcuffs hadn’t made an appearance for a whole week.

He let his heart lift just a little.

* * *

A week had passed. Ever since the night that Hans gently revealed his secret, Taki had been, of all things, distinctly embarrassed.

He was ashamed of his willingness to open up so immediately to Hans’ power, whether or not he had done so under the guise of disbelief or curiosity. It had felt like he’d gorged that night on Hans’ power, caught up in both the impossibility of it and the relief of knowing there was no use trying to hold back anymore.

And so for the past week, he’d tried to pace himself a great deal more, as much as such a thing was possible where Hans was concerned. In the middle of one of their unreal, hybrid conversations, Taki would turn away and a flash of something almost metallic would tell Hans he’d hit a sore spot and he would focus his attention elsewhere.

Despite the starts and stops and the occasional uncomfortable sensation that he’d let Hans in too far, Hans’ power and his words had been a source of immense comfort. I’ve only known him for two months, Taki would sometimes reflect. It felt like years. Time was a strange creature.

Even now, as they walked towards the holding cells, Taki felt anchored by Hans’ presence. He reflected on Hans’ lack of drama. How easy Hans always made everything – even something as momentous as sharing his secret. The diametric opposite of Klaus. Klaus, who still made his pulse skyrocket simply by stepping into the same room.

The comparison made itself known, in that way and in other ways, many times. Each time without Taki’s control.

Hans noticed and pretended not to.

Before they entered the holding cells, he asked just the one question.

‘Do you remember what you need to say, Commander?’

Taki nodded once.

* * *

White-hot rage.

Klaus stood up and took heavy steps towards the bars before stopping in the middle of the cell. His eyes were manic again, Taki realised. It had never hit him quite so strongly how completely Klaus let his emotions rule him.

Hans, meanwhile, again saw something about Klaus that he had noticed months ago. He saw that Klaus didn’t think about that night, the night from when they were sixteen, too often. It lingered there in the back of his head, like a dusty shadow in a wardrobe. But for Klaus there were far more pressing concerns. Concerns that took the form of a glittering snake and a small, black cat. Such vivid, almost child-like images, Hans thought, recalling an old fondness.

‘What the hell is he doing here?’

Hans. No guard, no cuffs, at Taki’s elbow while Klaus was behind bars. When only four months ago, it was the reverse. The symmetry didn’t escape any of them.

‘There’s something I need to ask you,’ said Taki.

Klaus tried to look at him. Tried to fight back images of Hans fucking Taki. Unknown to him, this left Hans struggling with the same images. Red and black. Grey and blue. Flashes of bare skin and cries and sweat.

‘I’m not saying a fucking word with him here.’

‘Klaus.’

It almost steadied him. He remembered how Taki said his name when he was beneath him, his lips swollen and his scent everywhere. How long ago that seemed now. Klaus wondered if he would ever see a future like that again.

‘Do you remember what you promised me?’ Taki asked, his voice unsure and entirely unlike him. ‘When you pledged yourself as my knight?’

A few blinks, brows pulled together. Suspicion in every line on his face.

‘What?’

‘Please answer the question.’

‘I – of course, I remember. What the hell’s going on?’

‘What were the oaths you took?’

Klaus’ jaw twitched, hands in fists. Hans took in the impotent strength in his immense shoulders and arms, his sheer size. A tethered wolf.

‘What were the oaths you took?’

Again that voice. Small and uncertain. It plucked a string somewhere in Klaus. Somewhere beneath falling cherry blossoms.

‘I… I cast aside my nationality, my rights and my kin.’ They were words he would never forget. And yet he struggled to sound them out loud where he was, in a stone cell, separated from Taki by iron bars. ‘And answer only to my master, who alone controls my destiny.’

Hans focused.

Taki waited.

Klaus, lost, tried and failed to catch his master’s eye.

* * *

 _I_ _found out what I could about this ability. I’ve honed it. I know how to push conversations so that people are forced to visualise answers that they may not divulge but which I can see._

Taki walked with Hans in silence for a while, not wanting to hear the answer.

Then, when they drew up beside the low wall on which an old Hans, recovering from his wounds, had rested to watch the sunset, Taki finally asked. The sun was again setting, recreating the scene almost exactly.

The look on Hans’ face was one of deep sadness. Taki felt a cold hand grip his heart.

‘Taki-sama. I really wish I could tell you different.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He - his honour and sense of duty will never permit him to say it out loud.’

Hans, it seemed, was also having trouble doing the same thing. And so, in a voice like the one he used in the cell, Taki spoke for him.

‘He wishes he never bound himself to me.’

There was a profound silence. One that he had dreaded for some time.

‘For how long?’ he asked, again not wanting to know. _Surely not this whole time?_

‘Not this whole time, no. Recently. Perhaps in recent months. I couldn’t pick up on how long exactly.’

Taki faced away.

‘He’s been trying to find ways to leave you,’ said Hans, his voice terse and regretful. ‘Defying your orders. Leaving for bouts at a time. But he feels like he can’t leave entirely, not of his own accord. Because of the vows he took. His sense of honour, in that regard, is rather admirable.’

No response.

‘He’s hoping… he’s hoping you’ll do it for him. Release him of his obligations. Especially now that the war is over and you no longer need him.’

Again, there was only the sound of Taki’s coat moving, catching in the breeze and being pulled back.

‘I’m sorry, Taki-sama. I can see how much you’re hurting.’

There was a flash, entirely unprovoked, of the second time they were back in Klaus’ little shed. The heat of Klaus. His hands and cock and lips.

A long, hesitant pause followed this image.

‘That part of him stills want you,’ said Hans quietly.

Taki looked round in time to see Hans look away. He was surprised not to feel humiliated. Only tired. Heavy. Heartbroken.

He opened his mouth, but Hans beat him to it.

‘I’ll leave you alone, Commander.’

‘Thank you,’ said Taki, relieved.

Hans’ guard, the Wagner enthusiast, was surprised when Hans caught him having a smoke in the shadow of their building and asked to be escorted back to his own cell.

 _I’ll never fucking understand what’s going on here,_ he thought to himself as he stubbed out the cigarette. _But at least the Saxon has decent taste in music._

* * *

At first, Klaus thought for sure there was a large cat scrambling up the tree near the window of his cell.

Then he heard a voice grunt in pain.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Klaus-sama!’

Klaus blinked in the darkness.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

More scratches, scuffles and another grunt. Klaus moved to the other side of his cell and tried to peer through the high barred window. Even from that angle, though he could see the bony twigs of the tree tops, the branches and trunk were just out of sight.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I tried to sneak in past the guard but he saw me.’

‘So you decided to kill yourself climbing a tree instead?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Klaus’ laugh echoed in the cell. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him laugh.

‘You’re unbelievable, kid.’

Haruki gave a short, distracted chuckle. After a bit more rustling and snapping twigs, it sounded like he had settled.

‘You alright?’

‘Yes, sir. Just a few splinters.’

‘Why the hell are you scaling trees in the middle of the night?’

‘I just – when I heard what happened, I wanted to find out if you were okay.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are… are you okay, Klaus-sama?’

‘I –’

The question stunned him for a moment. He scratched the back of his head and smiled.

‘I’m fine, kid.’

‘Okay.’ Haruki sounded unconvinced.

‘Is there any news on Uemura?’

‘No, sir. Well, that is, last we heard he was about the same.’

Klaus’ gut twisted again.

‘But it was an accident, wasn’t it, Klaus-sama?’

Leaning his shoulder into the wall, Klaus raised his eyebrows tiredly.

‘Don’t know if that makes much of a difference to Uemura, kid.’

There was a pause filled by crickets.

‘What’s going to happen to you?’

Again, Klaus was touched and surprised by the kid’s tone. It reminded him of the time Haruki had stood on the back of his bike, gripped his coat and asked why people said such awful things about him. He tried to be as cavalier as he had been then.

‘Don’t worry. I’ve gotten out of worse scrapes than this. Besides, I know the guy who runs this whole compound and he’s not so bad. You might have seen him around, actually. Black hair, green coat. Never smiles.’

Haruki laughed before he could stop himself. Klaus grinned.

‘Do you still have that smuggled radio of yours?’ he asked in an attempt to change the subject.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ve always been handy with that kind of thing. I remember the wireless you operated in my sidecar. I think I still have it.’

‘Do you use it, Klaus-sama?’ Haruki asked, sounding surprised.

‘I haven’t yet. But I could, I suppose. It’d be good for you to be my eyes and ears in the compound if I’m ever back out there.’

‘Absolutely, sir!’

‘My call sign’s Lycanthrope,’ said Klaus, again tickled by his enthusiasm.

A pause, then: ‘That’s so cool!’

The smile lingered for a while. Then his face darkened.

‘Haruki. If I’m ever out there again, keep an eye on the new guy for me. The other Saxon. He’s bad news.’

There was a pause outside.

‘I will, Klaus-sama.’

It sounded like he wanted to ask more but had lost his nerve. 

'Did you really come out here just to see how I was doing?'

'I... yeah, pretty much, sir.'

'I have to say, kid. It means a lot to know there's someone on my side.'

And before Haruki could figure out an appropriate response:

‘Now get the hell back to your dorm before you get expelled.’

‘Yes, sir.’

But it took a while until Klaus heard him begin the scramble down.

* * *

Taki stood by the window in his bedroom. Moonlight covered the grounds in its strange, silver sheen. It had taken hours, but he had managed to distill his thoughts down to a few simple lines.

_He’s been trying to find ways to leave you._

_He’s hoping you’ll do it for him._

Despite the effort of hours, questions still abounded.

How long had he felt this way? How long had he returned to Taki’s side only out of fear of dishonour? How many times had he nearly died for Taki all while cursing Taki’s name?

And, worst of all, how much of it was Taki’s fault?

He shuddered to think how long he would have forced Klaus to stay with him if it hadn’t been for Hans. Taki would have ignored all the signs, even the ones where Klaus couldn’t have been any clearer –

_I’m tired of it. There’s only so much I can take._

– all because of his own unforgivable, selfish desire to keep Klaus by his side.

Because of him, Klaus had nearly died countless times. And, because of Klaus’ frustration, so had Hans. And now Uemura was on the brink.

No more.

Even though he knew precisely what it would mean – how public and final and irrevocable – it was time for Taki to end it.

* * *

 _That part of him still wants you._

But there was a little time left. Before he ended it.

Almost as though the decision had already been made and had simply waited for Taki to catch up, he turned from the window, stepped out into the hallway and called to the soldier on patrol. The private hurried over.

‘Taki-sama?’

‘Please tell the sergeant in charge of the holding cells that I’d like Captain Wolfstadt to be escorted to my chamber.’

‘Right away, sir.’

‘And when he’s here, you may return to your quarters. I have something important I need to discuss with the captain. We’ll need privacy.’

‘For how long, sir?’

‘The whole night.’

* * *

The following morning dawned just as bright and cold as the last. An expectant hush fell over the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

Though they couldn’t be sure why they’d been gathered in the main square, the officers could sense that it wasn’t for anything good. A few dozen cadets milled about uncertainly as well. Though they had been instructed to remain in their dormitories, no one at that moment could spare the effort of disciplining them.

On the wooden platform that had been erected at the top of the square, on which Taki had held press conferences and shaken hands with leaders at the close of the war, Grand Chamberlain Hasebe stood uncertainly, along with a few other colonels.

Haruki and Ryoumei jostled for space among the cadets, who had a tough time seeing past the tall officers gathered in front.

When he glimpsed Taki-sama’s jade coat and katana climbing the steps to the platform, Haruki craned his neck. He knew that Klaus wouldn’t be following but he was disappointed nevertheless. And relieved that at least the red-haired foreigner wasn’t in his place.

A few blocks away, Hans stood by the window in his cell and focused on a scene he couldn't see. Distance had always been tricky but when emotions ran high, he sometimes caught them like motes of dust in wind.

On the square, Taki stood closer to the centre of the stage and didn’t say a word. All eyes were on him.

Two pairs of footsteps approached. Haruki’s breath hitched in his throat when he saw Klaus being led on stage by a private. The captain was brought to stand before Taki in his tan coat and boots, hands cuffed before him. Strange, Haruki thought, how small he suddenly seemed.

The private murmured something to Klaus, who slowly lowered himself to the stage on one knee. The private then bowed to Taki-sama and stepped to the side.

Taki took another few seconds before he drew his eyes down to meet Klaus’.

He knows, Taki thought. There was confusion, for sure. But more than that, there was resignation. Defeat.

It had to be done in public. The binding, after all, had taken place in public. But, just like last time, Taki couldn’t see or feel anyone else. Not Hasebe nor the colonels nor anyone in the square. He didn’t once shift his gaze from Klaus’.

‘Klaus von Wolfstadt,’ he said.

His voice wasn’t overly loud and yet, in the dead silence, it rang clear and strong.

‘When you became my knight, you took an oath to obey my every command. I told you not to go where I couldn’t follow. I told you not to go beyond my reach.’

Haruki felt like he was slipping feet first into ice.

‘You’ve defied my commands time and time again. I gave you an order to be by my side for our final fight and you directly disobeyed me. You abandoned me on the eve of battle. You went searching for ways to discredit the one person without whose help we would still be locked in a bloody struggle with our enemies. And in your recklessness and arrogance, you nearly killed Major Uemura, who is currently fighting for his life in the infirmary.’

His voice didn’t waver even once. The change in Klaus’ face was gradual. It was something only Taki could see.

‘There is no excuse for anything you’ve done.’

‘Taki –’

Klaus' voice was low and Taki had to roll past it, roll over it, before he lost his will.

‘You may not have given my secrets to the enemy or turned your weapons against me.’ He swallowed then; the first and only sign of a chink in his armour. ‘But your actions, the many times you’ve overstepped your role as my knight, amount to a betrayal nonetheless.’

_Your real feelings are the greatest betrayal of all. Even if I’m also to blame._

‘Please –’

‘I once told Grand Chamberlain Hasebe and Major Uemura, in the company of Second-Lieutenant Suguri, that if you ever betrayed me, I would settle it. By my own hand.’

Taki would wonder about this moment in the coming days. Despite what he may have said to Hasebe and Uemura, there was not even the smallest part of him that could have ended Klaus’ life. No matter what the situation, whether devised by man or god. Not even if Klaus had, in fact, given Taki’s secrets to the enemy. Nor, even, if he turned his gun on Taki. Not even if Hans had told him, in that clear, sombre way of his, that Klaus had grown to despise the very sight of him. Taki would rather have died a hundred times over.

And yet he unsheathed his katana.

Klaus’ eyes dropped to the steel blade.

‘ _No!_ ’

In Haruki’s head, he’d yelled. But in reality it came out in a loud whisper that only Ryoumei and a few of the other cadets heard. Haruki instinctively tried to push forward through the crowd and Ryoumei, feeling vaguely ridiculous, gripped his arm and held it.

‘He won’t,’ he assured Haruki in an undertone.

In the terrible silence that followed, Klaus moved for the first time. Just like he did once in a dark, blood-speckled holding cell, Klaus inched forwards and crouched low. Before every eye in the square, he closed his eyes and kissed the blade.

Although nothing changed in Taki’s face, he was worried that, at any moment, Klaus would look up and see through him. See through him better than even Hans could. The final words came to his rescue.

‘This is the last time you will have anything more to do with my blade. Or my battles. Or my name.’

He took a steady breath.

‘Our ties are henceforth severed. You are no longer my knight and I no longer control your destiny.’

Klaus didn’t move.

 _Almost,_ Taki told himself, willing the hand holding his katana not to shake. _Almost done. Get through it._

‘According to our laws, only two things can sever the tie between master and knight. Death or exile.’

Taki stepped back and re-sheathed the katana. The metallic swish sounded across the square, somehow even more ominously than when he’d drawn it.

The rest of his words came out a little faster, though they didn’t lose any of their quiet power.

‘Klaus von Wolfstadt. You are henceforth exiled from this country. You will soon be escorted to the border. Afterwards, if you are seen here again, you will immediately be placed under arrest and subject to severe punishment.’

Klaus hadn’t raised his head since he kissed the blade. Taki could only see the still, straight line of his mouth beneath the hanging strands of hair.

His next words were quiet enough that only Klaus heard them. Though it didn’t seem possible, they carried more weight than all of the others put together. He had no idea that Taki had intended them to be, of all things, kind.

‘Go home, Klaus.’

* * *

Haruki Yamamoto, whose heart was sinking right through the ground, would never have guessed that he was, in fact, suffering a great deal more than the man who knelt on the platform. 

For Klaus von Wolfstadt, newly released from his master, his duty and the life he’d envisioned for himself until the day he died, it was impossible to feel much of anything.

In fact, whether he’d slipped into a state of total numbness and denial or whether the gods had taken pity on him and briefly lifted from the scene, he almost felt like smiling.

He was lost somewhere in the previous night, which now, suddenly, made perfect sense. The previous night when he was roused from his cot in the holding cell and unexpectedly escorted to Taki’s room. When he was uncuffed and left there alone with Taki. When he tried to understand the look in Taki’s eye. When Taki moved beneath him and said his name, his hair caught in moonlight.

That was where Klaus was, in that moment, as he stared straight down.

 _At least, at least,_ he thought, momentarily hypnotised by the swirls and grains in the wooden planks. _At least we had last night._


	14. Grey and Gold

_LAST NIGHT_

No matter what the season, Klaus thought, the colour in Taki’s bedroom is always the same.

He absently massaged his left wrist when the sergeant removed his cuffs, even though his arm hadn’t been bothering him that much. Truth be told, he was nervous.

Taki dismissed the sergeant, who saluted and left, taking care to throw Klaus a dirty look as he passed.

Under normal circumstances, Klaus would have airily smiled back. But between Hans and the old man and Uemura and the way Taki was looking at him then, smiling was the furthest thing from his mind. He had no idea how Haruki Yamamoto had managed to wrangle an actual laugh out of him not long ago.

Taki stood by the sideboard on which there was still a bottle of something and a glass. Klaus remained by the door, trying to forget what he’d said to Taki the last time he was there.

‘You’ll have to go back to your cell first thing tomorrow,’ Taki said. Though his voice was soft, it broke the silence so completely that Klaus almost jumped. ‘Hasebe will be collecting you just after dawn so you have to be there before then.’

‘Why, what’s happening tomorrow?’

And we’re right back into silence, Klaus thought. He then recalled something stupid he’d once said and tried, despite himself, to inject a little lightness into the room.

‘I see. So you guys finally had that meeting, huh? Where you decided you’re going to drive me out to the middle of nowhere and shoot me.’

As expected, there was no response. Klaus allowed himself a small shrug.

‘It was funnier the first time I said it.’

‘Klaus,’ Taki said suddenly, voice still low enough to be a murmur. ‘Please don’t ask me any more questions tonight.’

Klaus was taken aback.

‘What?’

His attempts to read Taki from across the room were hampered by distance and darkness and his own knowledge that he would, most likely, never even come close. His young master had always been taciturn. Serious. All different kinds of conflicted.

But there was something different about him that night. It made Klaus nervous again. He felt as though he was meeting him for the first time.

And then Taki crossed the room to him.

* * *

At first Klaus bore it with the anxiety of being approached by a wild deer, knowing it could bolt at the smallest wrong move.

First, Taki had stood before him, eyes on his chest, mouth straight and unreadable. He wore his shirtsleeves and pants and his hair was a touch messier than usual. As though he’d run his hand through it a few too many times.

Then he met Klaus’ eye. Luckenwalde was summoned in that instant. The blue walls of Taki’s bedroom were replaced by the weathered panels of their dorm. Taki’s regal bed replaced by two single beds.

Taki reached out and touched his chest. He was warm.

 _I don’t know how to do this,_ he realised in frustration. He suddenly, powerfully, wished that Klaus had Hans’ power.

And so Klaus, feeling again like the deer hunter whose luck had miraculously turned, pressed Taki’s hand against his chest, bent low and kissed him.

When he pulled his head back, Taki followed. Klaus pulled him in, grateful he again had the use of both hands. Taki’s chest pressed against his without the sling getting in the way, so Klaus could draw him in, draw his hands over the lateral muscles of Taki’s back.

He then reached low, gripped the back of Taki’s thighs and hoisted him up, almost as though testing Taki’s weight, experimenting with his body, finding new ways to mould it against his.

Surprised at his sudden weightlessness, Taki broke the kiss and held onto Klaus’ neck while Klaus pulled his legs securely around his hips. He now had to look down to meet eyes of gold; reach down to feel the stubble on his jaw and neck.

His weight was perfect, Klaus thought again. He tilted his head up and pulled Taki’s lips with his teeth. Holding him up there, Klaus almost didn’t feel the need to move.

Remembering something, Taki tilted his face away and tried to glance down.

‘Your arm.’

Klaus pressed his nose against Taki's cheek.

‘It's fine.’

He'd be damned if he let a two-week-old bullet wound get in the way.

* * *

Eventually, of course, Klaus moved. He walked them slowly towards the bed, his mouth locked on Taki’s.

Once there, a familiar fire sparked. Taki’s clothes came off quickly, as did his own. There was Taki’s hand again on his chest, hesitantly dragging fingertips down his abdomen, his breathing laboured. He stopped before he moved his hands any lower.

Klaus' mind was on what Taki said earlier.

‘Dawn, huh?’

He kissed Taki’s neck hard and tweaked his nipple at the same time, both sensations Taki felt immediately throughout his body.

‘I wonder how many times I can make you come before then.’

He then took Taki’s fingers and wrapped them around him. He saw the flush. Saw Taki’s lips part slightly, eyes on Klaus’ cock.

‘Go on.’

With only a little pressure from the hand on the back of his head, suddenly Klaus’ cock was at his lips, the pre-come already salty on his lips and tongue.

He tried to take as much of it as he could and gagged almost immediately.

Klaus, meanwhile, coated his fingers in spit and reached over Taki's body. He pushed in and felt Taki’s moan reverberate through his dick. Klaus hunched over him and panted.

‘I'm in both ends, Taki.’

He pushed his fingers in as deep as he could at that angle, which wasn’t as far as he’d like, and so he reluctantly pulled Taki off his cock. He kissed him hard, teeth clashing, until Taki's back was pinned against the headboard. Klaus’ fingers were inside him again, probing a lot deeper. Too much, too fast.

There was a flash of sharp, familiar pain.

He tried to withstand it but the deeper Klaus' fingers went, the more it hurt. And Klaus’ mouth was still on his. He finally pulled away with a short gasp.

‘Klaus, it hurts,’ he said, breathless. Apologetic. Almost fearful of what might follow.

Klaus paused for a beat or two and then pulled his fingers out entirely.

He turned his head and reached for something on the bed. Then he turned back with his tie in hand. He pulled Taki's arms suddenly above his head. Taki felt the nylon burn on his wrists and gasped. In a few swift movements, Klaus had secured both his hands to one of the bed posts.

Then he moved back as though to take in the scene.

The look on Klaus' face sparked the strongest surge of desire Taki had ever felt in his life.

‘Spread your legs.’

In the silence, a shiver ran through him. He inched his feet further apart.

‘Wider.’

Face turned into his arm, hands in fists above his head, Taki obeyed.

After staring at him for long moments, Klaus crawled forwards again, still barely touching him.

‘So fucking beautiful.’

Before the words could sink in, his fingers were on Taki's lips, pushing past them, pushing out a few muffled sounds.

‘Get them good and wet.’ He leaned close, voice still hoarse with lust but suddenly quiet. ‘So it doesn't hurt again.’

Tears sprang then. Taki was grateful beyond words that he could chalk it up to what was happening.

_Don't use that voice. Don't be kind. You don't have to pretend anymore._

Fingers now slick and dripping with saliva, Klaus was inside him again. Gentler this time. And he almost immediately found it.

Taki moaned.

‘There it is. That's your spot, isn't it?’

He was insistent. He rubbed against it, pushed and pushed on it without ever once leaving it. Like he didn't care how terrifyingly quickly it made Taki's orgasm build.

‘Do you know what's going to be rubbing against that place next? What's going to be making you come over and over again until the sun comes up?' 

The answer nudged against Taki's entrance. Again, Taki's heart pounded at his size. It seemed impossible.

And then he pushed in and there was no more room for doubt. He wanted to cling to him but couldn't. He could only moan, the tie pulling at the skin of his wrists, the back of his head against the headboard.

Klaus hunched forward and kissed Taki’s exposed neck before leaning back to push his cock in the rest of the way. Taki was already soft. His insides made room without complaint. The heat and tightness once again beyond anything Klaus had known.

He pulled back and thrust in again, just once, just to watch how Taki's entire body responded, how Taki's wrists strained against his tie.

And then he started to fuck him properly. With long, merciless thrusts that carved him permanently into Taki's body. So nothing that happened tomorrow or the next day or the one after that would matter.

‘Klaus! Ah!’

_Yes…_

‘Nngh!’

_Klaus, you feel so good._

The words were there, on the tip of his tongue. By tomorrow, they wouldn't matter. He could say them now. He could look Klaus in the eye and say it because it was the truth.

‘Klaus –’

At that moment Klaus reached up and swiftly undid the knots holding Taki's wrists to the bed post.

The tie had barely been released before Taki leaned forwards and wrapped his arms around Klaus' shoulders, one hand gripping the back of his neck. They were both rocked back slightly, Taki now on top. His scent was everywhere.

Klaus wanted to wrap his arms around him too, with his cock buried deep inside Taki but unmoving. Just for a few moments.

Instead, he grabbed Taki’s hips and thrust up into him, hearing Taki's cries in his ear.

After a few minutes, Klaus rolled them over so Taki was flat on his bed. He hooked Taki’s legs over his shoulders and slammed into him, watching through narrowed eyes how the muscles of Taki’s abdomen clenched, how Taki seemed to have no control of his cries. How his face was overwhelmed with feeling.

‘I'm close,’ said Klaus, his sweat-damp hair hanging low. ‘Are you?’

Taki looked at him through narrowed, glinting eyes.

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck,’ Klaus hissed.

Taki held his face beneath his ears, fingertips in Klaus’ hair, and murmured his name. And Klaus came hard. Taki followed not long after.

* * *

Lying on his side, pressed against Taki’s back, he lifted up on his elbow and watched Taki sleep. By then, they’d already made love twice, fallen asleep, woken up and dived back in a third time. 

Between bouts, Taki barely strung any two words together. Klaus didn’t know what to make of the way Taki looked at him, touched his face, even once ran his fingers over Klaus' lips.

He would have given his right arm to know what his master was thinking. To do right by him.

And yet when he was inside Taki again, making him moan and gasp and writhe, he suddenly couldn’t care less that neither of them had spoken for hours.

The dark, dank cell he'd been in, from where he'd talked to a cadet in a tree, seemed like a distant dream. He smiled again.

 _I want to burn you into my eyes._ Graceful curve of his jaw. Lips in their usual straight line. Eyes closed. He kissed Taki's shoulder. Then moved down to the warmer skin of his neck. Taki stirred.

_Why am I here? Are you okay? Have you forgiven me for saying all those things and abandoning you? How’s Uemura? What's happening tomorrow?_

But Taki had said no questions.

He awoke, turned his head and they kissed again.

It seemed, at the time, like a very small price to pay.

* * *

The distance from Taki took a while to catch up to him. Days. And then when it arrived, it was so real that he felt the rings and contours of the hollow in his chest like the booming residue of a gong.

_'I always had the feeling I was beyond military reproach.'_

_'You're not beyond my reproach.'_

_'That's my point. I can't be court martialled. But if you see fit to punish me, I have to take it. I just know you won't.'_

Memories like that still made him smile at himself. At his breathtaking arrogance. But there was no longer any room for humour. His core had been removed. Wiped clean.

A Mad Dog without a master.

* * *

 _TWO MONTHS LATER_  

Winter was hardly the ideal time to be hunting landmines, but the Fifteenth Armoured Division didn’t have much choice. The white landscape stretched before them, dotted every now and then by dark, huddled figures gingerly testing the snow and soil beneath with their metal detectors. It was now well into the third week of the hunt.

During the peak of hostilities, the Western Alliance had laid mines in areas surrounding several military outposts. Even after the war ended, reports continued to pour in about dozens of men and soldiers losing their lives at the hands of this unseen evil.

The only real legacy of war, Taki thought. Violence following violence.

He stood by the road a few paces away from the jeep that brought them. Not far behind him stood Hans Regenwalde, a heavy black coat wrapped around his army fatigues. He was near enough to read Taki’s anxiety and his desire to be out there with his men; colours that were interspersed with vivid, violent fears of a mine exploding before their eyes. And swimming behind all of these, as ever, was the image of a motorbike and a tan coat.

Hans fought another wave of jealousy. He was unsettled to find it was the strongest one yet.

Though Taki’s thoughts of Klaus over the past two months often took the vague, ever-morphing shape of an idea rather than a memory, in that moment Hans thought he saw something specific. The bike revving to life beside Murakumo, zooming straight ahead with No Man’s land in mind, a gloved hand outstretched and grazing the side of the tank. A touch that Taki managed to feel through the metal.

There was a warning call from one of the parties on the field. Another mine that couldn’t be safely deactivated was about to be exploded from a safe distance. Taki and Hans snapped mufflers over their ears and watched the brilliant flare and rise of smoke and snow from afar. The muted silence of winter fell again when it was over. Throughout it all, Taki's mind stayed on the same image.

‘Here he is, Taki-sama.’

Hans watched the memory flicker a little but remain there, stubbornly, in the back of the commander’s mind as he turned to the sergeant who had spoken.

A Western soldier, a POW being held in a nearby holding facility, had been brought to Taki, hands cuffed and face glowering. Blond hair, blue eyes and a mouth so firmly set that Hans didn’t need his gift to be able to tell that he didn’t intend on revealing anything.

Taki tried asking anyway.

‘Fuck you,’ the soldier replied in Hans’ native language.

Even though only Taki and Hans understood him, he was dealt a heavy blow by the sergeant for his obvious disrespect. Taki raised a hand and swiftly reprimanded the sergeant with a single look.

He then exchanged a meaningful glance with Hans. Taki turned to the soldier and asked again in slow, careful tones.

This time, the soldier glared but said nothing.

Hans saw. He saw, first, the soldier’s blurry, half-baked plans to grab the sergeant’s gun and shoot Taki in the forehead, regardless of whether his own death would immediately follow. And beneath that image he saw the answer to Taki’s question. He saw landmarks like trees and rocks, places behind ridges and rises in the land. Places where the soldier and his unit had carefully removed earth, deposited their delicate cargo and covered it back up.

Taki waited for Hans’ nod before he told the Sergeant to take the POW away.

Hans then scanned the landscape before him, taking his time, and made marks on a map. It was far from accurate but it was also a far cry from the slow terror of blind sweeping.

‘Tell your men to be careful, Taki-sama. I don’t know how reliable his memory was.’

Taki gave the map to his sergeant who led the second team of military engineers armed with metal detectors. For the past three weeks, the sergeant didn’t once ask his commander how he could possibly know the exact location of the mines.

Six hours later, cautiously happy, confident that the area was clear, the men began trooping back to the jeeps.

Almost no one expected the explosions.

A deafening sound. And then two more. A split-second flash of light and three immense plumes of snow rushing into the air in the shape of an implausible blossom.

Without pausing to think, Hans threw Taki to the ground beside the tires of the jeep.

When the ringing in his ears started to ebb, Taki heard the din of the yelling soldiers. Heart pounding, elbow throbbing where it made contact with asphalt, he tried to raise his head. Hans lifted to a kneeling position above him, brushing snow out of his eyes, trying to gather his bearings.

A few minutes later, after they confirmed that no one had been killed or even hurt, a few red-faced soldiers on a team further out rushed over, explaining that they were in the process of deliberately exploding a landmine from a safe distance and simply set the trigger off by accident before being able to issue a warning. Even more unexpectedly, the falling debris had triggered two more mines, both unseen, that were nearby.

This inspired a few bursts of weak laughter which the other engineers couldn’t contain even in the presence of their commander. Taki, sighing inwardly with numb relief, made sure each of his men was safely in his jeep before he climbed through the door his sergeant held open for him.

Hans, who climbed in a moment later, was left to face the truth of his utterly instinctive and almost embarrassing reaction when he heard the explosion. He remembered how he’d mutely helped Taki back to his feet, unable to look him in the eye.

The sun dropped behind the snow-laden hills in a watery, yellow haze.

A few minutes into the drive, against the soothing backdrop of the jeep’s engine, Hans finally spoke.

‘I’m sorry, Commander,’ he said, trying to watch his words so as not to rouse the curiosity of the driver. ‘I should have seen it. Maybe if I’d focused more, I would have known where they hid those last few mines.’

He was in the backseat of the jeep while Taki sat beside the driver in front. Eyes that were both dark and bright, both trusting and wise beyond their years, turned to look at Hans.

He was genuinely apologetic, Taki realised in surprise. Even after everything he’s done.

_Imagine the impact it would have if just one person were to lend them a kind ear. Without judgment. With an open heart and mind. It might even change the course of history._

‘What should have taken months took only hours, thanks to you. You saved countless lives today. You have nothing at all to apologise for.’

‘I appreciate the sentiment, Taki-sama, but –’

‘You’ve done my country another tremendous service,’ Taki said, his voice firm and leaving no room for debate. ‘Thank you, Hans.’

A swell of pride, again unexpected.

‘I’m at your disposal, Commander,’ said Hans finally. It was his customary reply.

After Taki turned back, Hans kept his eyes on him for a few seconds longer than was necessary. Then he turned to watch the landscape flash by in various shades of white.

* * *

He knew the order could come through any day. He knew the timing was ideal and that that he had his best shot now with Klaus out of the way; Klaus, who had come uncomfortably close to discovering everything.

And yet, with each passing day, it was getting less and less likely that Hans would actually be able to go through with it.

* * *

When the jeeps arrived, they found the youngest members of the compound in a state of minor panic. One of the radio operators had initially misunderstood their report about the landmine explosion and, while this mistake was cleared up immediately, there were already rumours among the cadets that several soldiers had been injured, including the commander. 

And so there was a small gaggle of them by the gate that was quite relieved to see Taki leaving the jeep without a scratch on him.

Taki was startled to see them there.

‘What’s going on?’

Though they saluted and bowed, they managed to do so while looking sheepish. The bravest among them spoke up.

‘We thought something happened to you out there, Taki-sama,’ said Ryoumei Fukushima. ‘There was a report that a landmine exploded.’

‘It did, but we’re all fine,’ Taki assured them with a small smile as Hans drew up alongside him. ‘Go back to your schedules.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Taki turned to walk away and Hans went to follow when a strong burst of something caught his attention. He stopped and cast a quick glance over the cadets, searching for the source.

When he found it, he was both surprised and amused. He fell back into step with Taki and wondered whether he ought to bring it up.

‘There’s a young cadet,’ he said at length, ‘harbouring surprisingly strong feelings for Klaus.’

Taki turned his head. Most of the cadets had already taken off except for the one who had spoken and Haruki Yamamoto, who stared after Hans with a strange look on his face. With some urging from his friend, Haruki finally turned to leave.

‘You mean Cadet Yamamoto? Yes, he’s always looked up to him.’

At that, Taki was surprised to feel a fresh pang of guilt and regret. He’d never considered what Klaus’ exile meant to anyone else.

As they walked through freshly shovelled snow towards the main building, Taki found himself running through the number of times he and Klaus had been parted since they met at Luckenwalde almost two years prior.

The first time was when Taki sent Klaus on the first train mission. Disastrous though the mission turned out, they had only been separated for a single day.

The second time was when Taki watched the _Arai_ take off the runway and soar over the dark water of the bay. Two days. A short absence that Taki nevertheless felt quite poignantly. And an absence that ended abruptly when he opened the door to a tired but pleased Klaus throwing back scotch in his room.

Then came the second train mission. Almost four weeks. Taki remembered the physical weight he carried in his chest, one he suspected others could also see.

And now. Now. It had been well over two months. This time it wasn’t so much a lead weight in his chest as an ever-changing landscape of emotion. Taki couldn’t ever pin one down for long enough to identify it. The one constant – the one thing to which he consistently flashed back – was his prescient sense that if Klaus left his bedroom that night they had their awful fight, it would be the end of something.

But he pushed that landscape with its unpredictable surges of pain as far into the background as he could. After all, he still had his duty to perform.

The division was in the various stages of winding down for peacetime. There were still various arduous tasks to perform, the latest being landmine sweeps. Afterwards, there were plans to return the compound to its former state as the Reizen winter residence. The cadets would be sent home in a month. The soldiers and officers not long after that.

It had been implicitly agreed that Hans would remain while the division wound down its operations. The future beyond that was a subject neither he nor Taki had broached.

* * *

Hans’ presence and company had gradually become a constant. Although he remained in his walk-in closet turned holding cell, and although Taki was still awaiting confirmation from his network that he was who he claimed, Hans Regenwalde, for all intents and appearances, was no longer a prisoner.

Nothing cemented his presence in the compound more than Hasebe’s dramatic change of heart. Whether due to his acceptance of the role the foreigner had played in their victory or Hans’ overall disposition of seriousness and respect, especially where the commander was concerned, Regenwalde’s worth in Hasebe’s eyes had considerably outdone that of Wolfstadt.

As far as Hasebe was concerned, Wolfstadt had hurtled into Taki’s life, boarded the train and knelt by his feet to become his knight all in the space of one breath. Regenwalde, by contrast, had slowly proven his worth. Stepped forward when called on and dutifully stepped back when not needed.

But for Taki, nothing, not even Hans’ gentleness and quiet dedication, had eased the pain of constant splinters. A laugh that rumbled, golden, through the airwaves. A gloved, outstretched hand grazing the side of the tank as he zoomed away.

* * *

They entered the building where Taki’s chief of staff found them and asked whether the commander would be taking his dinner in his room. Taki replied that he would.

By the time he hesitated and looked at Hans, the question was already clear in his mind. Hans would have taken him up on his offer had he not seen it again. The golden laugh and the outstretched hand. He suddenly realised he didn’t want to sit across from Taki, dining and making conversation and glimpsing sudden, sporadic thoughts about Klaus.

It had been two long months of the same.

‘No thank you, Commander,’ he said before Taki could ask. ‘Please excuse me. I’m feeling a little tired today.’

‘I understand.’

Disappointment. In a small, chrome spike. Hans guiltily savoured it.

When he turned to go up the stairs, the commander’s words came to him before his thoughts.

‘Where will you go?’ Taki heard himself ask. ‘After we’re finished with everything here,’ he added awkwardly when Hans turned back around.

‘You mean will I be roaming from shore to shore making the world a better place with my gift?’

Humorous words delivered with no humour at all. It had taken Taki a while to get used to.

‘I considered it, but I might rest on my laurels for now. Ending a war, I hope, counts as my good deed for a few years.’

‘I would say so,' Taki said, words again failing to capture the magnitude of what Hans had done.

‘As unimaginative as it sounds, I think I’ll go back home. I’ve told you that I gathered together a small fortune over the years. It’s waiting for me in my country. An estate. Even a private library. And now, finally, all the time in the world.’

He tried a smile which Taki, to Hans' amazement, returned. The effect was stunning. 

Hans struggled to regather his thoughts.

‘What – what about you, Commander? I assume you’ll also return home.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your sisters are charming,’ said Hans after a small, familiar pause. ‘Your thoughts of them are like nothing I’ve seen in you before. Lavender. And…’

He stopped again. Taki found he often did that when he tried to verbalise what he saw. After all, he’d never before had to find the words. Not for the first time, it made Taki feel humble and grateful. For being allowed to witness what was, according to his uncle, a divine gift.

‘Would you like to meet them?’ he asked suddenly.

Temporarily distracted by his search for words, Hans didn’t have the chance to see the question coming.

‘Before you return to your country, I mean,’ Taki explained. ‘It would be an honour to have you in the Reizen residence.’

Hans’ eyes softened.

‘The honour, I assure you, would be all mine.’

The relief Taki felt when he agreed made him realise how nervous he’d been when he asked.

Hans’ smile then flickered and he spoke his next words carefully, trying to keep them light.

‘Your sisters might wonder why the tall, golden-haired spirit now returns with red hair.’

The effect of his words was immediate. Like a house of cards falling, Hans thought. On the surface, however, Taki gave away very little. Just his chin and eyelids lowering. The smallest flicker of hurt.

‘How are you doing with… all of that, Taki-sama?’

There was a silence in which Hans saw single blend of colours.

_I hope he’s okay._

And then a more complicated shade: _I’ve always felt his absence more than I felt his presence. I don’t know what that means._

And then a little shift in colours. Something bled through in a warm, red-tinged note Hans didn’t expect. This was the thought Taki chose to voice.

‘I’m glad you’re here.'

Another pause.

‘Nowhere I’d rather be, Commander.’

When he closed the door of his small room behind him, he hoped furiously, vainly, that the order would never come through.

* * *

Exactly a week later, it did.

By then, Hans had been coming to the holding cells to visit Alric Liedermann and Gunter Straffberg on a regular basis. The commander had always been aware of these visits and in fact had apologised that he couldn’t extend the same courtesies to Hans’ men that he’d been able to give Hans.

‘I had to see it to fucking believe it,’ Straffberg had said the first time he came in. ‘No cuffs and no guards. It’s like you’re running the whole damn place! How did you get Reizen to eat out of your hand like that?’

Hans’ glare had quietened him.

‘Any word?’

‘No.’

The answer brought about frustration at first. Now relief.

And then, finally, it happened.

In his quick, precise way that nevertheless contained a hint of breathlessness, Liedermann told him one chilly afternoon that everyone was in place and the mission would be carried out that very night.

Hans’ fate, and Taki’s, had been sealed by a few syllables uttered through a small, powerful transceiver that Liedermann had kept hidden in his cell for long months.

Hans fell silent.

‘Is the plan still a go?' Liedermann prompted. 'We’ll take down the guards here and then help you deal with Reizen.’

Their commanding officer remained quiet for a lot longer than they expected. They waited.

‘Take down the guards,’ Hans finally said. ‘But I’ll deal with Reizen alone. Rendezvous at 0100.’

Liedermann frowned. A last-minute change of plans was highly unlike Regenwalde, not to mention dangerous for the whole operation.

‘But –’

‘That’s an order, Lieutenant.’

He walked out of the holding cells into a harsh winter wind and pulled his coat around him tighter.

* * *

Cold day gave way to cold night.

Taki was surprised when there was a knock on his door, followed by Hans’ low, quiet voice.

‘Come in.’

As he entered, Hans swept the room in one quick glance. He’d seen so many representations of it in both Taki and Klaus’ memories that the real thing felt almost like a stage.

Sitting at the table by the window, Taki rested his fountain pen atop the ledger. An unrelenting pile of paperwork found him in his uniform though it was nearly eleven in the evening.

The only thing that had lifted the tedium was a strongly worded letter from Major Uemura, who was writing from the hospital to which he’d been transferred and where he was making a speedy recovery. He expressed profound appreciation for Taki-sama’s concern for his health but he refused to be sent home, honourable discharge or otherwise, even a second before his duty at the Fifteenth Armoured Division was over. He told Taki-sama to expect him back at the compound within the week. Taki had sighed and filed the letter away.

‘Am I interrupting, Taki-sama?’

‘Not at all.’

He’s genuinely happy to see me, Hans realised, his insides writhing with guilt. Hatred of Mussolin. Regret over every decision, dating as far back as high school, that led him to this one.

Taki picked up on it. Something was different about Hans. He wondered if it was partly because Hans hadn’t taken off his thick black coat. It accentuated the pale, marble-like quality of his skin.

‘Is everything okay?’

Hans didn’t reply. A few white flecks of snow stood out clearly on his wide shoulders. Taki wondered what he’d been doing outside.

He pushed back his chair and stood up, unsure of what else to say. His eyes fell on the sideboard where, against his better judgment, the bottle of scotch had remained. For two whole months, he hadn't been able to bring himself to ask the maids to take it away.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he ventured uncertainly.

He was almost at the sideboard before Hans finally spoke.

‘No thank you, Taki-sama. I don’t drink.’

Taki stopped and stared. Again, he felt the rare urge to smile.

‘Neither do I,’ he said quietly.

Snow fell in gentle drifts outside the window.

From that point on, things took on a sudden, surreal life of their own. In a way that Hans was barely able to control, let alone predict.

It began with Taki.

Though he was never prone to idle fantasy, their simple exchange found Taki suddenly wondering what it would have been like if Hans, not Klaus, had been his roommate at Luckenwalde. Followed him silently back to his country. Fought silently at his side. Listened and obeyed silently to his every command. How different things would have been.

Taki wouldn’t have suffered so much. He wouldn’t have passed out and woken up in Suguri’s office that terrible afternoon. If it had been with Hans, in the same way, he couldn’t imagine that it would have been quite so…

Quite so…

He was suddenly blushing.

Hans, of course, saw it all. And Taki remembered this a second too late.

He moved smoothly, fluidly, and crossed the room in a heartbeat.

‘Hans –’ 

The kiss, like everything else about Hans, was gentle. Far gentler than Klaus had ever been. Large hands held Taki’s face lightly. His palms and fingers were surprisingly warm.

What struck Taki most was the difference. He felt different. Smelled different. Even tasted different. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to him that Klaus was only one, not all.

The past two months tried to line up logically in his mind. Hans’ undeniable strength. The companionship and comfort. And now, in addition, there was the sudden thought of him in Taki’s bed, kissing the inside of his wrist, moving long, slender hands over his body.

But in that split second, more than comfort and desire, Taki felt the difference.

A difference as striking, and simple, as that between grey and gold.

He pulled away almost immediately.

* * *

He didn’t have to say anything, of course. Hans saw it all. 

Taki’s face was flushed, his lips parted a little, his breathing a little forced. He stepped back almost into the sideboard. Hans’ hands fell to his sides. Flowers had briefly filled his head.

‘Hans –’

‘I’m sorry.’ Hans felt something twist into nothing inside him. ‘Klaus and I… I guess we’re more alike than I realised.’

Taki searched for the words. He wondered if Hans understood the whirl of thoughts in his mind. He tried to condense it all.

‘I can’t,’ he said, hearing the apology in his voice.

There was a heavy pause.

‘I know.’

Relief. Guilt. Embarrassment. Not all that different, Taki thought, from how Klaus made him feel.

Taki turned away and took a few steps towards the window, trying to recall how things had turned out this way.

* * *

Hans Regenwalde then imagined the scene that might follow. It was a scene he’d pictured and turned over and edited and rehashed so many times he’d thought of almost nothing else for two months. 

 _Taki-sama_ , he would say, and Taki would turn from the window at the strange tone in his voice; a tone he’d never heard before. _You’re in danger._

_Danger?_

_I lied about almost everything. Ever since I came to you and long before then, I've been a spy for Chancellor Mussolin._

_What?_

_The network I’m part of. We were to win over the trust of the leaders of this country. We were to help you defeat the Western Alliance. For Mussolin._

_I don’t understand._

_And then, when your guard was down, we were to destroy you. To make it look like the Western Alliance was to blame. To make room for new leaders that Eurote could control._ (I’m talking politics, he would think to himself in disbelief and frustration. I’m trying to explain the politics while looking into those dark eyes in this dark room.) _All to pave the way for Eurote to spread its power and influence outwards. Maybe even start more wars._

_Hans -_

_I got the order today. I’m supposed to kill you now. Tonight._

Hans imagined silence.

_The fact that the order came through means the emperor’s dead, Taki. As are all the other Reizen leaders. I’m sorry._

Taki would be shocked but he would brace himself. Even without his katana or shinai, or his tanks or his men, he would be ready to fight.

_When I first came, I intended to go through with it. But now I… I’ve nearly gone mad trying to figure out how not to. Please understand, Taki, it was never as easy for me as walking away. Mussolin is more powerful than you know. If not me, then he’ll send someone else. He wants you dead. He always has. He just needed you to win the war for him first._

Here, Hans thought, was where Taki would start to believe him.

_Sooner or later, he’ll succeed. And he’ll have me killed too, for failing to carry out my orders._

What would Hans do then? Take a step back, hands outstretched, like he was trying to prove he wasn’t a threat?

_But I have a plan. Please hear me out._

And what? Taki would actually listen? To the plans of a man who’d just confessed that he was sent to kill him?

_Come with me, Taki-sama. We can escape. If we run now, they’ll never find us again. Come with me and I’ll keep you safe –_

_So Klaus was right,_ Taki would say, his voice low and stunned.

* * *

Even in Hans’ imagination, one he controlled in entirety, he couldn’t prevent Taki from saying those words. In that exact tone. And then Klaus would swim across Taki’s mind, his jaw and arms and hands and voice and scent, everything that a much younger Hans had wanted in the same way, and the new Hans would once again be left jealous and confused.

_Come with me and I’ll keep you safe._

A slow, sad smile.

It was laughable that he’d even lent his imagination to such a scene.

* * *

Taki’s back was still turned when something changed in Hans’ face. 

No cuffs.

No guards.

And just to be thorough, just for the sake of poetry, Hans cast his mind over the compound as far as he could reach to pick up a signal which, until he met Taki, had been the strongest one he’d known.

No Klaus.

He picked up the large, heavy glass bottle of scotch on the dresser.

Taking a few silent steps towards the commander, he brought the bottle down as hard as he could on the back of his head.

Taki fell to the floor without uttering a sound.


	15. A Small Black Cat

When the gun was stashed away and the grisly task done, when Hans was sure that another drop of blood lost would certainly spell the end of Taki Reizen, he set to work patching him up again. He’d left Taki on the floor of his room for a charged few minutes while he raced back to his cell for the supplies he’d smuggled from the infirmary.

After he did what he could to stop the bleeding, he loaded up the syringe. Taki had long since lost consciousness and so the anaesthetic was only a cautionary measure.

Still beautiful, he thought, his insides gradually icing over. Even lying here close to death. Even when his mind had gone completely silent.

He shrugged off his coat, wrapped Taki Reizen up in black and easily lifted him into his arms.

So light. How did the young prince command so much power? So much love?

He had asked himself that when they first met in the compound four months ago, when he pulled Taki to the ground to whisper in his ear. Now he understood.

* * *

Liedermann and Straffberg were on edge when their commanding officer arrived at the eastern exit of the compound. The care with which he lowered his unexpected cargo into the back of the jeep made Liedermann break the heated silence.

‘Is he still –?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were supposed to kill him,’ Straffberg said, sounding a little stunned.

Hans didn’t reply immediately.

Mouth still open, Straffberg threw Liedermann a nervous glance. Regenwalde was their superior. It could be considered insubordination if they questioned him any further.

‘New orders came through on a different line from the top. We need him alive. Don’t mention this to the others. Mussolin wants it under the radar for now. Is that clear?’

He cast a quick glance over them and read primary, fairly uncomplicated thoughts. Straffberg believed him. Liedermann didn’t. But he didn’t have much choice.

‘Sir.’

Hans checked his watch as they climbed in the jeep, Straffberg in the driver’s seat and Liedermann beside him. Hans sat in the backseat and took the transceiver that Liedermann passed him.

‘When will they send the coordinates of the safe house?’ Straffberg asked.

‘Any minute now,’ Hans replied.

‘Is it safe to be broadcasting it on the radio?’

‘Can you think of any other way?’

Straffberg grunted. 'Even smoke signals seem safer these days.'

‘They’ll deliver the message in code. Plus this country’s tech is ancient. No chance that the usual channels can be used to intercept us. Not unless someone’s within two klicks with an even more powerful transceiver.’

‘Two klicks?’ Straffberg was both impressed and reassured. 

* * *

At that moment, less than one klick away, Haruki Yamamoto worked his wireless for what felt like the millionth time.

After he smuggled the new radio and various parts to his room, he’d spent nearly two weeks putting it together, poring over diagrams and blueprints he'd taken from the library. Each failed attempt seemed to spur him on even more. Then, when he finally got it working, he spent almost every waking minute of his spare time at his desk, twisting the dial and calling out a single word.

Ryoumei’s patience with his best friend had ebbed and flowed over the past two months.

He was excited during the installation of the wireless. Haruki had always been a whiz with technology, once even having rigged up a wireless in the Saxon’s sidecar while in the middle of combat. (How long ago was that now? Ryoumei wondered, feeling, for the first time, the relentless flow of time that adults tended to drone on about.)

But instead of using his new powerful device to eavesdrop on military and civilian channels, which is what they usually did, it became clear that Haruki was searching for someone in particular. There was one name that he called out at regular intervals for hours at a time.

Pride and annoyance stopped Ryoumei from asking what it was for the first few days. Then, finally:

‘Okay, what the _hell_ is a Lycanthrope?’

Haruki had ignored him for a further ten minutes before giving up and switching off the radio. He looked at Ryoumei without really seeing him. It was morning and classes were scheduled to start soon. Ryoumei was tightening his laces and Haruki had yet to start dressing.

‘Klaus-sama’s call sign,’ he explained, his tone flat. ‘But the transceiver’s range is only around eighty klicks. If he’s not in the country, there’s no way he’ll hear me. Still, though, I know the frequency of his wireless and if there’s a chance…’

Ryoumei always suspected the latest obsession also owed to the Saxon but it didn’t do anything to ease his annoyance. It even ignited a flare of anger.

‘You’re unbelievable, you know that?’ He stood up. ‘He’s a traitor. Taki-sama said so, in front of everyone. He’s not even a knight anymore. What more do you need?’

Haruki stood up too.

‘He’s _not_ a traitor. That's not even what Taki-sama was saying.’

There was a tense pause.

‘Why the hell do you care so much?’ Ryoumei said, voice rising. ‘What, just because you rode next to him in the middle of a battle that one time and he let you keep his gun for a bit you think he’s some kind of god? You just fell for his crap, just like Taki-sama did!’

Haruki stared for a moment or two. He couldn’t remember ever arguing with Ryoumei like this. And he knew he was on the losing end. Ever since Klaus was sent away, the world had felt skewed towards the losing side.

But he couldn’t slide downwards; not just yet. Even if it was as futile as setting up his radio daily and hoping to hear from him, hoping to hear that he was safe and nearby, that he hadn’t actually left Taki’s side, that he wasn’t actually a traitor… Haruki would wait to hear it.

‘You just don’t get it,’ he said, surprised at how cold his own voice was.

With that, he turned to his closet and pulled out his uniform. The fist-sized crack in the closet door had started to become a familiar sight.

Ryoumei left without waiting for him.

That was around two weeks ago. Since then, Haruki had also gone through phases. There were days he didn’t look at the radio and became more like himself again. But those days would inevitably give way to another bout of obsessive searching.

Ryoumei’s annoyance steadily turned into pity. Occasionally even admiration.

‘Say he has just gone back to his own country,’ Ryoumei said at one stage, this time his tone considerably softer. ‘That would mean he’s permanently out of range. Don’t you think you’ll have to give up eventually?’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki admitted, his face drawn. He nevertheless kept twisting the dial.

Ryoumei sighed dramatically.

‘It’s always been fucking annoying for the rest of us, you know? To have a moony-eyed dope of a friend who refuses to see anything but good in the world.’

Haruki looked up at this. It didn’t sound anything like Ryoumei.

‘If you were anyone else, I’d say you’re hands-down nuts,’ Ryoumei continued with a small smile. ‘But because it’s you, who knows? It might actually work one of these days.’

Haruki blinked and then grinned.

‘Thanks, Ryou.’

He turned back to the radio with gusto. Ryoumei folded his hands behind his head and watched him for a bit, wondering what he’d unleashed.

It was a few days after that, at around midnight, with Ryoumei fast asleep and snoring, that Haruki intercepted something. Chalking it up to another dry military communication, he very nearly skipped past it.

But the voice caught his attention. It was familiar.

He listened and his curiosity grew. The man was speaking a different language. Strong and heavy, with consonants that dragged and melded into one another.

Haruki realised two things simultaneously; the language was that of Klaus’ country. And the voice was the same one that he and Klaus had overheard in Murakumo during the final battle. The voice that had made Klaus swing his fist into Haruki’s wardrobe.

Then another voice came through. A stranger. Still speaking the same language and speaking in short, clipped tones. Like he was reading out information in snippets.

It took a few more seconds before Haruki picked up on a few western words that they’d been taught in school. Words that may have had some military usefulness in combat (or during interceptions exactly like this, Haruki thought, heart suddenly threatening to pound of his chest).

They’d been taught numbers, which Haruki heard. And words like ‘code’ and ‘coordinate’, which his ears also picked up. He was suddenly regretting not having paid closer attention in class.

There was a great deal of feedback. The information was scratchy.

Keeping his eyes trained on the frequency panel, Haruki pressed his left headphone closer to his head and scrambled for pencil and paper with his other hand. The sound of drawers being opened woke Ryoumei.

‘Would you keep it down?’ he complained thickly, eyes closed again. ‘It’s not fair if your insanity keeps us both up.’

‘Shh!’ Haruki hissed. He began scribbling.

Ryoumei was suddenly wide awake. He climbed out of bed and hovered behind Haruki’s shoulder. Haruki was tense like Ryoumei hadn’t seen him before. He peered at what Haruki was writing.

It was nonsensical. Ryoumei tried to mouth out the random sequence of hiragana and katakana characters but he only succeeded in making sounds.

Fifteen long minutes later, when Haruki was sure no more information was coming through, he finally took off his headphones.

‘I heard people talking in that western language,’ he told Ryoumei. ‘I think one of them was that new foreigner that Taki-sama always has with him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember western script so I tried to write it all down in our characters.’

He reviewed the mess on the paper helplessly.

Ryoumei gave a loud yawn, already sinking back into boredom.

‘Just when I thought you finally got through to your boyfriend,’ he said, falling back into bed. ‘Or is Taki-sama’s new foreigner going to be your new obsession?’ He smiled to himself in the darkness. ‘Oh, I get it. You have a thing for western guys, is that it?’

Haruki barely heard him. There was something in Hans Regenwalde’s voice that had put him on edge. He slid the paper carefully into the top drawer. Then, trying not to look at the radio again in case he was pulled back into the trance, he climbed into bed and tried to fall asleep.

The next morning, they awoke to a country in chaos.

* * *

In the single largest co-ordinated attack that had taken place in their small nation’s history, the male leaders of the Reizen line had all been assassinated overnight. The emperor had been found lying dead in his chambers. So had nearly a dozen other Reizen leaders.

In every situation, a few of those who had been close to the leaders, whether as confidantes or advisors or second-in-command, had fled. They had won over their leaders’ trust over the course of months, years in some cases, and then betrayed them.

The news spoke of nothing else.

The Eurotean chancellor publicly condemned the vile attacks on their allies. He called the assassinations a desperate final act of vengeance by nations who had lost a war. Mussolin then expressed his deepest sympathies over the deaths of the emperor and all of the male heirs to the throne, including the inimitable Taki Reizen, whom he considered both an ally and a friend.

Each and every leader of the Western Alliance was quick to claim that they had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the assassinations.

The world didn’t believe them.

* * *

A chill that had nothing to do with winter gripped the Fifteenth Armoured Division that morning. Last night’s snow had melted in the morning sun and while clouds hung in the air, poised, ready to let loose, no fresh flakes drifted from the sky.

At each exit of the compound, there were newsmen with their pads and cameras and impossible questions being held back at the gates by increasingly frustrated soldiers. The clamouring sounded everywhere throughout the compound. A compound that had lost all life and colour.

As he and Ryoumei ran to the reception hall, Haruki tried and failed to piece everything together. There was just too much.

The emperor is dead, he thought, his mouth dry. All of the Reizen leaders. All last night. Taki-sama…

Was it possible? So soon after the war ended? The injustice of it welled up inside him, tempered only by a growing numbness.

They rounded the corner to the reception hall just in time to see someone being escorted inside surrounded by officers. Though neither the weight of the man’s robes nor his general stature were as stately as the emperor’s had been, it was clear that he was nobility. The boys saw a thin, harsh line of a moustache beneath high cheekbones and stern, glinting eyes. After he was ushered into the reception hall the doors closed with a foreboding thud and a soldier immediately planted himself before it.

Haruki and Ryoumei glanced at one another and tried somewhere else.

They tried to explain it all to the few officers they could find. They tried to explain about the transmission. About hearing the coded language spoken by the foreigner who was now suspected of having murdered Taki Reizen.

Time and time again, the paper covered in meaningless scribbled was frowned at.

‘How do you even have access to a radio?’

‘With a wireless that I… put together.’

‘That _you_ put together? Cadet, what makes you think this is the time for pranks? You should be ashamed.’

‘But, sir –!’

‘Go back to your dorms right now like everyone else and await further instructions.’

No one listened.

Soldiers were stationed at every entrance to the main building where Taki’s room was. Officers of varying rank continued to come and go, all wearing the same expression. The compound was heavy with a loss that was so sudden, so unthinkable, that it seemed like nothing more than a vivid, unrealistic nightmare.

On the way back to their dorms, Haruki found himself trying to bite back tears. In addition thoughts about the commander’s kind smile and the strength of his voice during combat, he couldn’t help imagining how Klaus would react to the news when he heard it, wherever he was. The thought sent a stab of pain through him.

Ryoumei was frustrated to find he wasn’t far away from tears himself.

As they trooped miserably past the reception hall again where the doors were still firmly closed, Ryoumei had an idea. A terrible one that would easily get them both suspended.

He stopped. It took Haruki a few steps before he noticed and turned around.

Ryoumei stared at the building. Somewhere in there was Hasebe. Officers of the Fifteenth Armoured Division. And that man who was clearly nobility, possibly even a Reizen. People who could make things happen. People who might listen to what they have to say if it concerned Hans Regenwalde. People who would do anything in their power to avenge the death of their commander.

‘Come on,’ he said to Haruki. ‘One last try.’

* * *

_NO MAN’S LAND, NEAR THE EUROTEAN BORDER_

Taki dreamed.

He dreamed of the moment when he thought no one was coming. That Klaus wouldn’t come. He was about to board the train. And then he heard footsteps.

He dreamed of waking with huge hands in his hair, in an embrace that was entirely too stifling for the heat of that morning. A wide mouth that was smiling slightly, even in sleep.

He dreamed of a white, coursing river into which he’d fallen willingly. He’d gone where it carried him. And this time, when his minders found him and scolded him, he didn’t take their words to heart. The river was all there was. He loved it. He always had.

He surfaced from these dreams only once. Into a small, musty, wood-panelled room. And into pain like he’d never felt before.

Then, with relief, he sank back into darkness.

* * *

Haruki listened as Ryoumei confidently told the soldier standing guard that they had an urgent message to deliver to Grand Chamberlain Hasebe from Lieutenant Honda. The soldier hesitated but let them through. Once inside the building, their shoes echoed damningly loudly as they ran across the room and down the corridors.

They arrived at the large double doors to the general meeting room, panting, grateful that their little plan had worked.

Haruki was ready to burst through the door, guns blazing and paper in hand. Ryoumei held him back. He couldn’t say why exactly; perhaps it was intuition or the fact that his cadet training had kicked in. Recon first. They had to pick their moment.

He held a finger to his lips and inched the door open just a fraction. There they crouched and listened, hearts pounding louder than the voices within.

‘…still alive?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

‘Then what _are_ you saying, Grand Chamberlain?’

The smoothness of the voice and the accent. It was the dignitary.

‘Tachibana-sama,’ came Hasebe’s deeply uncomfortable voice. ‘I’m saying that we should send out search parties. Put out a public notice. If there’s still a chance that Taki-sama is –’

‘Second-Lieutenant,’ the man named Tachibana interrupted smoothly. ‘Suguri, is it?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Tell us again what you found in Taki-sama’s bedroom.’

There was a brief pause. Neither Haruki nor Ryoumei breathed.

‘Blood,’ said Suguri, his voice trembling only slightly. ‘A large pool of it on the carpet by the bed. And blood spatters that are… consistent with a gunshot.’

Haruki was fighting back tears again. He remembered sitting before Taki-sama in the hull of Murakumo. He remembered how, even in the midst of battle, the commander had held Haruki’s chest to steady him each time the tank lurched or came to a sudden halt.

‘Is it conceivable that someone who lost that much blood might still be alive?’

‘I…’

It was as though the nation’s future hung on the assessment of one second-lieutenant.

‘I don’t think so, Your Grace,’ he said finally, sounding as though the words caused him physical pain. ‘It’s hard to say, of course, but… with the amount of… of blood and the….’

Suguri’s voice trailed away.

‘You see,’ said the dignitary. His voice, Ryoumei noticed, didn’t hold any softness. No sympathy. It was hard-edged and bureaucratic. ‘There’s absolutely no point in raising the hopes of the entire nation only to be proven wrong a few days or weeks down the track. The country will come to a standstill trying to find him –’

‘Then the country will come to a standstill trying to find him!’

Hasebe again. The cadets had always been a little afraid of the Grand Chamberlain but Haruki felt his chest swell with relief and gratitude. Only his voice so far held the amount of incredulity and anger that was befitting of the situation.

‘Do you hear yourself, Hasebe? We can’t have that sort of instability and uncertainty so soon after the war. Hope, especially misplaced hope, can be a dangerous thing. We must tell the public that he’s dead. When we let the press through, we must tell them that Taki-sama’s body was discovered in his residence. Just like the others.’

Silence.

‘It’s the only way we can restore any sort of order.’

‘What sort of _order_ are you proposing without the Reizens?’ Hasebe asked. His voice was still acerbic but Haruki noticed the wind had been taken out of his sails.

‘They’ve asked my uncle to step in as interim leader in the emperor’s place for now,’ said Tachibana. ‘Only for now, until the shoguns decide on the next successor. And I’ve been sent to take command of this division, also in the interim.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘Despite being one of the eight noble branches, we are taking on this responsibility with heavy hearts.’

The back of Ryoumei’s neck prickled.

‘So you’re suggesting,’ said Hasebe, ‘that we don’t even _try_ to find Taki-sama? We can send out some men under the radar. The press don’t have to know.’

‘I’ve already taken care of that,’ said Tachibana. ‘The Eurotean chancellor has been kind enough to lend his own men and resources for this.’

‘Mussolin?’

‘He’s always been on good terms with our family. And he wants to see Taki-sama safely returned as much as I do. If he’s out there, we’ll find him. Until then, there’s no point rallying up the press and the public in the name of what is, according to the Second-Lieutenant, a very small chance.’

Haruki looked at Ryoumei. Such freakishly huge eyes, Ryoumei absently thought.

 _Now?_ Haruki mouthed. His hand gripped the paper, whose flimsiness suddenly constituted the single largest clue as to Taki’s possible whereabouts.

Ryoumei’s mind raced. Before he’d come to any real decision, he found himself pulling Haruki away from the door. The voices beyond grew fainter.

Haruki tried to resist at first but the strange look on Ryoumei’s face stopped him. They walked briskly back towards the main entrance.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked in a loud whisper that echoed.

Ryoumei didn’t answer until they were outside. They blinked in the strange, hazy light, wondering if their eyes were having trouble adjusting to the world outside. Then they realised a light snow had begun to fall. The grounds were again dusted with a fine, white powder. Haruki shivered and hugged himself, the paper pressed tight against his ribs.

‘Ryou, did you hear them? Taki-sama might still be alive! We have to tell them what I heard.’

‘There’s something bigger going on here,’ Ryoumei said, trying to filter through it. Tachibana. Mussolin. ‘I don’t know what, but we can’t trust anyone. Definitely not that Tachibana guy. And it won’t be long before Hasebe has to start taking his orders and reporting directly to him.’

Unsure of what else to do, they walked back towards the dorms.

‘At least,’ said Haruki, trying glumly to find the silver lining. ‘There’s someone out there looking for Taki-sama.’

Ryoumei said nothing. He didn’t believe a word that had come out of Tachibana’s mouth.

* * *

The pain Taki felt when he was on the point of consciousness was beyond anything he’d thought possible. It consumed him so completely he couldn’t remember a world without it.

With an inhuman effort, he opened his eyes just a fraction.

He was in Klaus’ shed. Heavy footsteps sounded. And there he was, watching Taki in concern and guilt.

‘Klaus...’

Speaking hurt him, sent a jolt throughout his body that brought him closer to being fully awake.

Then, when the haze filtered away, so did the shed. So did Klaus.

He was in a small, unfamiliar room that smelled like earth and had wood-panelled walls and floor.

And there was Hans, not Klaus.

‘I had a feeling you were awake.’

Pain. Pain on the back of his head. Pain on the inside of his left arm where there was a large cut that appeared to be stitched back up. And pain, the worst of all, in his left side just above his hip. Like bolts of angry energy were shooting from there throughout his entire body.

He could barely move. He tried to speak again.

‘Where am I?’ He was shocked at how weak and thin his own voice was. ‘What happened?’

Blankets. A thin mattress. A makeshift IV drip with the tube going into his left arm. Another single bed, its blankets pulled tight and neat over pillows, beneath the boarded window. The musty, earthy smell.

Hans crossed to the small table by the bed and set down a small one-way radio.

‘Bear with me, please, Taki-sama.’

‘Where are we?’

‘A safe house.’

He worked quickly and quietly. He replaced the compress on Taki’s forehead, checked the drip and the state of his wounds, his hands cold and gentle. Taki had no strength to protest.

He tried to piece his last memory together. He and Hans were in his bedroom. The kiss. Taki stepping away towards the window and then everything going dark.

Another Western Alliance attack? Did they hit the compound? Just Taki’s building? How did Hans make it out?

His head swam. Hans’ face, his high cheekbones, pale lips and stone-grey eyes, went in and out of focus. Something about him sparked a flare of warning. Something that he managed to feel even through all the layers of pain.

‘What happened?’ he asked again.

‘I’ll tell you soon, Taki-sama.’ His measured voice contained a note of real remorse. ‘When you’ve recovered a bit more. Please understand. It will come as a shock and in your state -’

 _Tell me_. The strength of this single thought surprised Hans. _My men. Are they –?_

‘They’re fine. Two privates on patrol in the holding cells were shot and killed. But no one else in your division was harmed.’

Taki’s side spiked in pain. Hans saw it and reached for a syringe.

‘Morphine,’ he said as he carefully slid the needle into Taki’s arm. The effect was almost immediate. Though the pain began to recede in little waves, Taki’s head swam even more.

Hans refused to say more for long minutes. Taki’s mind and, when he felt strong enough, his voice kept sending the one request.

‘Please,’ he said weakly. ‘Please tell me.’

For a long moment Hans stared at him. That same flare in Taki’s gut. Something was very wrong.

‘We’re in No Man’s Land,’ he said eventually. ‘Near the Eurotean border. There are others, Western soldiers like me, in the rooms of the main house. We’re in an annexed room towards the back. Most of them don’t know you’re here.’

None of it. None of it made any sense.

Hans then reached over to the radio and switched it on. He turned the dial until he found a news station. The announcer’s clear, clipped voice came through the speakers.

It took Taki a while to focus.

And then he heard. His heart pounded. He was sure it couldn’t be real.

And then, with a feeling like he had floated above his own body, he heard the announcer mention, almost in passing, his own death.

‘What is this?’

‘It’s what happened. What’s happening.’

Hans’ voice was low and flat. 

Silence claimed that small room in No Man’s Land.

‘I’m sorry, Taki-sama.’ Cold and resigned and, again, a hint of genuine remorse. ‘My orders were to kill you last night. Instead I brought you here.’

‘No –’

He tried to sit up. Hans held him back as gently as he could.

‘Please don’t move. It will only make your injuries worse. You lost a lot of blood.’

_How?_

Hans visibly flinched.

He detailed what he’d done slowly, as though he were a surgeon detailing the operation; where he’d shot Taki, from where he’d let him bleed. Enough blood, he explained, so they would assume Taki was dead.

The shock of it would a long time to absorb fully. Taki was nowhere close to understanding.

‘Why are you doing this?’ was all he managed to get out. He was too exhausted for tears. For anything more than hollowness. To really let his naivety and foolishness and utter stupidity sink in.

_Klaus. Klaus, what have I done?_

And so Hans explained everything without any further restraint. Eurote. The network of spies. Hans’ role in all of it.

‘Mussolin used your country to win,’ Hans said. ‘And then turned on you as soon as your usefulness was up.’

Against the backdrop of general shock, one part made absolutely no sense.

_Why didn’t you just kill me?_

Hans averted his eyes for the first time. He stood up and gathered his equipment.

‘You will find everything you need here. Your wounds will be healed in a few months’ time and we can leave here as soon as the furore dies down.’

He was composed, Taki realised. This was as agitated as Taki had ever seen him but he was still very much in control.

‘But you have to understand,’ he continued. ‘You can never return to your home country. If Mussolin finds out you're still alive, we’ll both be dead sooner or later. He’s more powerful than the world realises just yet.’

Taki tried to move but the pain and the morphine, in their tug of war, left him nearly paralysed.

_Who are you? How did things turn out like this? Was it all about Klaus? Or me? Or –?_

‘You’re too weak for all that, Taki-sama. Try to rest. I won’t be far so I’ll know when the pain gets to be too much.’

In the doorway, he hesitated. He looked over his shoulder at Taki who was fast sinking back into unconsciousness.

A small black cat, Hans remembered. And he saw me as the glittering black snake.

Strange how, even without a gift like mine, Klaus saw it from the start.

* * *

Ryoumei was unusually quiet when they returned to their dorm. The cadets had been called into an emergency meeting but neither of them had gone. Haruki didn’t know what to do with himself. He nervously watched Ryoumei, who stood in the middle of their room, apparently lost in thought.

His hair’s so messy, Haruki thought. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen Ryoumei comb it. 

Suddenly, Ryoumei turned to him.

‘Try again.’

‘What?’

‘Try to contact him again. Lycan-whatever.’

‘Klaus-sama?’ Haruki blinked, wondering if Ryoumei was making fun of him or simply not feeling well.

‘I think we need him.’

‘What for?’

‘To find Taki-sama. I think he’s the only one we can trust.’

Haruki gaped. Ryoumei made a noise of frustration. He felt his pride chipping away.

‘Didn’t you tell me that Klaus never liked the new foreigner?’

Haruki remembered clinging to the branch of a tree and speaking to Klaus through the barred window of the holding cell.

‘Yeah, Klaus-sama said something like... he knew he was up to something.’

‘Well, turns out he was right.’ _And I was wrong. Whatever._ ‘Find him already. Do your radio thing, now.’

And with that, he headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Haruki asked, still very much at a loss.

‘To smuggle some pork buns for you from the cafeteria. I get the feeling you’ll be at it for a while.’

‘But… but like you said, he might not even be in the country –’

‘Don’t care,’ said Ryoumei, his voice now wafting back from the hallway. ‘You’re not leaving your desk until you find him.’

* * *

Silence and static.

‘Lycanthrope. Do you read me? Over.’

A few hours later, towards midday, the snow was coming down in heavier gusts and Ryoumei was already beginning to lose hope. But he felt embarrassed by his rather dramatic change of heart and couldn’t bring himself to admit it.

‘We could actually go out and try to find Klaus,’ he suggested as Haruki chanted _Lycanthrope_ every few minutes and turned the dial. ‘How far away could he be, really?’

Pork bun wrappers littered the desk. Ryoumei lay on his bed, throwing and catching a baseball. He made a game of getting it as close to the ceiling as possible without touching it.

‘It takes three days by train to get to his country,’ Haruki replied, taking another bite.

‘Oh.’

Silence and static. Haruki occasionally lifted his headphones to wipe away the sweat that had gathered around his ears and hair.

‘This is the Fifteenth Armoured Division calling Lycanthrope.’

The steadily whitening world outside had managed to insulate them from the terrible reality of that morning. He felt numb, and not together an unpleasant sort of numb. He wondered if he’d stumbled into some form of denial.

‘Come in, Lycanthrope.’

Silence and static. Haruki sighed and polished off the rest of his bun.

‘Hey,’ he said to Ryoumei through a mouthful, ‘can you pass me another –?’

_‘…read me?’_

Haruki froze. The deep voice crackled through the headphones like a flicker of light through fog.

_'This is Lycanthrope responding. Say again. Over.’_

* * *

With great difficulty, Haruki swallowed his mouthful of pork bun and pulled the wireless closer. 

‘Klaus-sama, can you hear me?’ His heart pounded in his throat. He remembered to add ‘Over!’

_‘Affirmative. Who is this?’_

‘It’s Cadet Yamamoto, sir!’

_‘Haruki?’_

A brief pause. Ryoumei sat up and stared, hardly daring to believe that Haruki had done it.

_‘Where are you? What’s going on?’_

Haruki’s incredulity and excitement suddenly gave way to dread. He remembered why they’d been trying to contact him in the first place.

‘I’m at the compound, sir, in my dorm room. Klaus-sama, there’s been a – last night –’ Haruki flailed, prompting Ryoumei to widen his eyes impatiently. Haruki braced himself. ‘Sir, they… they say that Taki-sama is –’

_‘They’re wrong.’_

The strength of his words alone made Haruki believe him instantly.

‘How do you know, sir?’

_‘I don’t know. But…’_

Haruki couldn’t be sure if it was the feedback or the distance or his imagination but, in that moment, he thought he heard Klaus’ voice break.

_‘I don’t believe it. There’s rumours that his body wasn’t found. That's what I – that's what everyone’s saying.’_

‘Where are you, Klaus-sama?’

_‘An hour away by bike. I never left the country. Been laying low near the border about three hours west. Turned back as soon as I heard.’_

Haruki thought about Tachibana.

‘You shouldn’t come here, Klaus-sama. Things are happening at the compound. I’m not sure what, but I don’t think it’s good. I think they’ll stop you from trying to find Taki-sama if you come here.’

_‘What do you mean?’_

Haruki struggled again. It seemed far too complicated to understand, let alone explain. He tried to refocus.

‘Before that, I have to tell you something, sir. I overheard something on the radio last night. It sounded like that other foreigner. I forgot his name.’

_‘Hans?’_

‘Yes, him! It was around midnight. He was talking to someone else over his radio. In your language. I think it’s code. I wrote down what I could.’

 _‘Read it out,’_ Klaus said at once.

‘I…’ Haruki reached for the paper and tried sounding it out again. He paused when he was finished. ‘Did that make any sense to you Klaus-sama?’

_‘No. Plus I can barely hear you over the feedback.’_

‘Sorry.’

_‘Not your fault, kid.’_

There was a slight shift in the feedback. The clarity improved by a fraction. It sounded like Klaus had stopped. If Haruki had to guess, it sounded like he was thinking. The picture came to him immediately and vividly; the captain astride his bike, one foot on the ground, snowflakes falling into his hair and coat. His face drawn and rigid.

 _‘It sounds like you overheard coded co-ordinates,’_ he said eventually. _‘But the line’s too frazzled for me to get everything down. Plus we’ll need someone to crack it.’_

It all sounded impossible but Haruki heard something in Klaus’ tone that kept that spark of hope alive.

_‘And you’re saying I shouldn’t come back to the compound?’_

‘It might be too dangerous, sir. It’s like they don’t want Taki-sama found. They want the country to think he’s dead.’

_‘He’s not.’_

‘We… we don’t think so either.’

_‘Who’s we?’_

‘Uh… me and Cadet Fukushima, sir.’

 _‘I can think of a few more people who’ll be on our side,’_ said Klaus after a pause. _‘I’ll need you to do something for me, Haruki.’_

‘Anything, sir.’

Ryoumei thought he heard something new in Haruki’s tone.

_‘I need you to find three soldiers. Azusa, Date and Moriya. Did you get the names?’_

‘Yes, I know them.’

_‘Good. Find them, show them what you have and tell them what you know. Tell them to meet me in an hour about twenty klicks north of the compound. I’ll be near the river just before the turnoff to the Mitzue Outpost. Do you have all that?’_

‘Uh…’

Haruki scrambled. Ryoumei read his mind and rifled through a drawer.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Haruki, writing the location down on the back of an envelope Ryoumei had found. ‘Got it.’

_‘Find Azusa and the others as soon as you can.’_

‘Roger that.’

_‘You did well, kid. Really well.’_

‘Thank you, sir,’ Haruki replied, feeling a lump rise to his throat for no reason. He couldn’t even be sure if the information he’d heard would be of any use.

_‘Remind me to thank you properly when this is all over, okay? Over and out.’_

The line dissolved into static.

* * *

Haruki stared at the radio for a few seconds before he slowly removed his headphones. Feeling returned to his body. He felt the hardness of the wooden chair behind him. He saw scattered on the desktop the little white fibres of their ill-gotten pork buns. White specks not at all unlike the flakes slowly coating the world outside. Beside him, tense and expectant, Ryoumei waited for his report. He was sitting, Haruki realised, exactly where Klaus was the day they overheard the final battle together.

He made his decision in that moment.

He pushed the chair back, got to his feet and wrenched open his closet door. As he rummaged through his possessions looking for something, Ryoumei lost his patience.

‘Well? What did he say?’

‘I think he’s going to find Taki-sama.’ Haruki found it finally – an old canvas bag. ‘He told me to give the code I heard to Azusa and a few others. They’re going to meet Klaus and help him.’

Ryoumei processed it all.

‘Sounds like a plan, I guess,’ he said doubtfully.

He watched as Haruki began piling things into his canvas bag. Clothes, a torch, some batteries. He moved to the desk and also threw in the envelope, the paper with the code scribbled on it and even a few of the pork buns.

Ryoumei stood up and only then realised that, in all that time, he hadn’t let go of the baseball.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked cautiously, already knowing the answer.

‘I’m going with them.’

Haruki tried to stuff the wireless into the bag too, which was proving difficult given how full it already was. Ryoumei sat still and gaped, trying to put his disbelief into words.

‘Are you crazy? We’re fourteen! We’re cadets!’

Haruki looked at him suddenly.

‘Do you want to come, too?’

‘What? No!’

But suddenly Ryoumei was considering it. He and Haruki and a few soldiers in a jeep, flying out of the compound to meet Klaus, heading off to some unknown location. And the commander… perhaps they might even be able to save the commander if he was still alive. Duty and love and uncertainty and fear and fatalism and even a sense of adventure all jostled for space in Ryoumei Fukushima’s head.

‘I…’

Haruki heard the hesitation in Ryoumei’s voice and brightened up.

‘I know we can help!’ he said. ‘We’ve done this much so far. And if everyone else is turning their backs on Taki-sama, he’s going to need all the help he can get.’

As he spoke he had his hand under the mattress of his bed, searching for something.

Eyes on Haruki’s canvas bag, Ryoumei realised he was actually, ridiculously, on the point of saying yes.

And then he saw what Haruki pulled out from under the mattress. As though confirming it was still there, Haruki unwrapped one side of the shirt to reveal the shiny black barrel before hastily covering it up again.

‘You _still_ have his gun?’

Haruki, who was busy trying to find space for it in his bag, didn’t seem to hear him.

_Anything, sir._

The way Haruki had replied to whatever Klaus had said had struck a chord with Ryoumei. It made him feel the same unfamiliar emotion he’d felt when Klaus had interrupted their kendo practice.

‘So are you coming?’ Haruki wanted to know.

Ryoumei took in Haruki’s flushed cheeks. His one-minded sense of duty. To Taki-sama, sure, but to the Saxon especially. Ryoumei thought about the endless days and weeks his friend had spent waiting to hear the foreigner’s voice through the wireless.

 _This one’s on Haruki,_ Ryoumei realised, though he himself didn’t even understand what that meant.

‘Nah,’ he said finally. ‘There’s only room for one of us in that Saxon’s sidecar.’

Haruki’s face fell. Ryoumei tried a smile.

‘Hurry back, okay? Otherwise I'll have to partner with Lieutenant Honda in kendo. And you know he moves slower than a goddamn tree – hey!'

Haruki had gone to him and hugged him, his canvas bag swinging rather painfully into Ryoumei’s hip. Surprised, Ryoumei took a second and then patted him awkwardly on the back with his baseball.

‘I'll be back soon, Ryou,’ Haruki said after stepping away. He flashed Ryoumei a quick grin and, just like that, he was gone.

His closet door was still wide open.

Ryoumei was left alone, feeling like one did when things happened far too quickly to catch up in one sitting.

He went to Haruki’s wardrobe and closed it. Then he stared at the hole in the door and realised he’d never asked Haruki what on Earth had happened there.


	16. Enigma

_Who are you? How did things turn out like this? Was it all about Klaus? Or me? Or –?_

Each question, independently, was a very good one. When put together, the picture was more complex still. In reality, not even Hans Regenwalde could be sure of the answers anymore.

He’d been flung from one distrustful gaze to another throughout his childhood. Even his parents, both small-minded aristocrats, had been afraid of him. His uncanny knowledge of their innermost thoughts, particularly those about one another, had nearly cost them their marriage. And so they’d carted him off to boarding school and were greatly relieved when, upon his return, their adult son didn’t seem to want anything more to do with them.

At first, his gift had made him weak. Weak to other people’s pain and fears and constant, pulsing anxieties which he couldn’t help but feel as though they were his own.

He was weak especially in the face of their lies and hypocrisies. His parents, his minders, the few friends he’d had as a child. Even though they cared for him, they would occasionally and unpredictably broadcast a shockwave of meanness. Sometimes about him, sometimes about others. It ranged from the petty to the truly awful. He saw it almost daily.

When he was older, he came across a theory that changed his outlook. An eminent psychiatrist theorised that if anyone was to know what their closest friends and family thought of them, viscerally, with no filters, it would push them to despair and even suicide.

Having considered the option on more than one occasion, Hans then realised his victimisation was no different from anyone else’s; not really. People had always been, and would always be, cruel to one another at random and without reason. He was simply able to see it more.

And so he grew a thick skin to it. To other people, to their thoughts about the world in general and their thoughts about him. He condemned himself, without any drama or anguish, to a world where he simply wouldn’t fight back.

That was where Klaus had found him.

And of all the people he’d ever met, Klaus was the first who was the same both outside and in. Whose thoughts occasionally strayed from the true and righteous path but never out of heartlessness. And of all people, Klaus was the one who extended to him a hand of friendship.

Hans still remembered his first sip of beer at the water’s edge. The few mouthfuls of vodka he’d swallowed that were to be his last. He would forever associate alcohol with the wave of disgust that rolled over Klaus, and by extension, Hans, after he pulled away from their heated kiss against the wall. The crushing blow, the shame, of knowing that Hans himself had inspired it in someone he cared about so deeply. Inspired it to such an extent that Klaus would turn from him as he was being thrashed by the dusty football field, that day and every day to come, and would never so much as look at him again.

Though he didn’t think it possible at the time, over the next few years, he managed to let go of the hurt. At the same time, he let go of his defeatism. He nurtured it until it became something else. Something more powerful.

People had always been, and would always be, cruel to one another at random and without reason. And so he began to capitalise on that.

* * *

He remembered the atmosphere in that basement room in Eurote. When stocky, oily-haired Adar Mussolin himself passed around the files. Each man saw each file; each strategic location. Outposts and divisions scattered across that small Eastern country that had no idea what was coming.

Hans flicked through every file that was passed to him and felt next to nothing. It was simply another war, another glaring testimony to the relentless stupidity and barbarism of his species, and he would emerge on the winning side yet again.

And then he was passed the file for the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

He paused for a moment at the first full-page photo of Commander Taki Reizen. He was struck by beauty that found its source in both fragility and strength. The piercing, challenging gaze. Division Commander at just twenty years old, Hans thought. How intriguing.

The very next page contained a group photo of the staff and officers of the division, all standing in rows before the main building.

And there, standing beside Reizen himself, his hair gleaming in the sun, was Klaus von Wolfstadt. The only smiling face in a sea of seriousness.

Despite his gift, or rather because of it, Hans had never once believed in any notion of divinity; certainly not the kind where the gods actively had anything to do with their petty, monstrous, hypocritical children.

And yet, seeing Klaus’ face there for the first time since high school, in a manila file in his hands, Hans Regenwalde couldn’t help but take it as a sign.

He volunteered to take on that particular division.

Adar Mussolin remembered Regenwalde from the previous war. He’d never really trusted the silent, unreadable westerner, but the man had proven invaluable several times before. And he seemed to work best when no one questioned his tactics or his strategies. So he agreed without giving it any further thought.

* * *

It was midday but the sun was nowhere to be seen. Haruki’s footfalls echoed as he pounded the pavement and sent snow flying when he cut across the fenced-off areas. The bag was already getting heavy, he realised. Perhaps he’d packed a few too many batteries.

Moriya was the first one he found and, surprisingly, the one who convinced the other two to let a fourteen-year-old cadet come along on what might have been the most important search-and-rescue mission in recent history.

Haruki’s instincts to go to Murakumo first, where he’d last seen all three soldiers in action, were rewarded. Moriya was crouching on one of Murakumo’s outer flanks, inspecting the canon. Despite the look of intense concentration behind his glasses, he wasn’t doing anything useful at all.

He’d been eating an early breakfast with the other two when they heard the awful news. While Date exploded at everything and nothing and Azusa’s eyes swam with tears, Moriya had retreated behind his veneer of stolidness and announced under his breath that he had a few checks to run on Murakumo that he’d put off for long enough. Date, red-faced, who was busy cursing every Saxon that ever lived, didn’t notice. Azusa watched Moriya’s retreating back with sorrow but, at that moment, he couldn’t bring himself to console anyone else.

Checking the tank’s canon was the latest in a list of useless tasks Moriya had performed to keep the grief at arm’s length. While somewhat successful, the tedious check-ups couldn’t filter everything out. He was still occasionally assaulted with memories of childhood.

Memories of a small, serious Taki in his kimono trying to explain to Date why it was improper to hitch up one’s robes and squelch barefoot through mud. Date, in turn, trying to explain that it was the only way to find dead crayfish. They couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. Taki had sighed, turned to Moriya and given him a small smile; one that expressed the shared grievance of having such a companion.

A laughing Azusa had then taken Moriya’s hand and tugged him away but Taki’s small smile lingered. It was strange how often Moriya remembered that moment as an adult. Like it was a secret about the commander he treasured and kept to himself. He didn’t even tell Azusa about it.

Images of young Taki, more so than Taki as Division Commander, continued to creep up on him as he worked. Taki at seven, then ten, then fourteen. At fourteen, Taki had –

‘Second-Lieutenant Moriya!’

He glanced down.

At fourteen, he suddenly realised, Taki had looked a great deal like the cadet who was standing in front of him now, gasping for breath.

‘Who’re you?’

‘Cadet Yamamoto, sir. I rode in Murakumo that one time when –’

‘Oh, yes, I remember.’

‘Sir, I have an urgent message for you from Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt.’

Moriya was sure he’d misheard.

A few minutes later, Haruki was running towards the barracks to find Azusa and Date while Moriya sprinted in the opposite direction to commandeer a jeep.

* * *

It didn’t take long. The jeep was parked in the square ready to go. Weapons were slightly trickier, but Moriya guiltily took advantage of the compound’s state of shock and uncertainty to get past the sergeant on false orders. He grabbed three guns and as many grenades as he hoped wouldn't look too conspicuous and headed past the sergeant before he could take note of what he’d taken, again throwing the name of a Major General Someone or Other with whom the sergeant could take it up if he had a problem.

The cadet had apparently done a decent job of convincing the other two (or, more likely, Moriya reflected, they were so desperate to do something, anything, that Haruki’s news came as a welcome relief). They left the barracks wearing all their gear and grim, focused expressions.

_Didn't we make a promise a long time ago that we would stay by Taki's side and protect him?_

Everything was packed and the doors were slammed when Moriya caught Haruki’s look of wide-eyed disappointment through the window.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The kid wanted to come,’ Date said, slipping a cartridge into his gun. ‘I told him he was dreaming.’

‘Wait for orders here, Cadet,’ Azusa said more kindly. ‘It’d be good to have someone keeping an eye on everything in the compound.’

Moriya stared at the boy. In Moriya’s front pocket was the paper with the scribbled code that Haruki had given him, along with the location of where they were to meet Wolfstadt.

Something about Haruki’s defeated face, his bulging bag and the reverie he interrupted stopped Moriya from lifting his foot off the brake.

‘How old are you?’ he asked the cadet suddenly.

‘Fourteen,’ Haruki replied in a resigned voice.

 _He looks so much like him,_ Moriya thought again. _At that age, anyway. How did I not notice before?_

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Date demanded from the backseat. ‘Let’s get going!’

‘I think he should come if he wants,’ said Moriya, staring straight ahead.

‘ _What?_ ’

Even Azusa was baffled.

‘Fourteen is old enough to be a reserve,’ said Moriya. ‘Kids much younger have had to do much worse in our country.’

‘But –’

‘And with everything he’s done so far, don’t you think he has the right to decide what he wants to do in this situation?’

The other two stared at the kid, who suddenly looked as though a light had been switched on behind his eyes.

‘We’re all in new territory here. Let the kid see his own way through it.’

And so a begrudging, scowling Date shifted over in the backseat so that Haruki, who felt like he’d just had the break of his life, could climb in next to him.

As the jeep sped north, Haruki had more time to explain how he'd intercepted Hans Regenwalde's transmission. He pulled his wireless out of his bag to show them.

Azusa examined it and was immediately impressed.

'This is one of the best wireless transceivers I've seen. A range of eighty klicks! Did you really put this together yourself?'

Haruki, cheeks a little flushed, explained that he did his own research into Western Alliance technology in his own time, even though they were told not to in class.

'I never understood why,' he said. 'It doesn't make sense why we should be so... removed from the rest of the world.'

Date wasn't paying attention and Azusa was still lost in the new toy. But Moriya heard something in the boy's tone that got him thinking again. He watched him in the rearview mirror and had the strange feeling that the kid might, one day, go places.

* * *

The safe house, according to the brief report that Hans, Liedermann and Straffberg were told over the radio as they sped out towards No Man’s Land, had been a farmhouse a long time ago, perhaps even centuries ago, in a time before the locals believed the region had become ‘impure’ and abandoned it entirely.

‘Superstitious hicks,’ Straffberg had muttered under his breath.

‘It’s thanks to those superstitious hicks that we’ll be safe,’ Liedermann pointed out evenly. ‘There’s no chance they’ll venture out into No Man’s Land to find us.’

It was a wooden, one-storey affair situated at the top of a slight incline overlooking a lake, now frozen solid. Three bedrooms and a living room would house Hans, his men and two more teams that had been working nearby as part of the network; a total of nine spies. There were similar safe houses scattered throughout the Eastern Country and No Man’s Land. They would wait until Mussolin deemed it safe enough for them to return to Eurote without arousing suspicion.

After they left the compound, he told Straffberg to gun it. They flew down roads speckled with snow and skidded precariously around icy corners. Liedermann and Straffberg exchanged looks the whole way. Their commanding officer didn’t seem to relax until they were speeding down the flat, desolate landscape that marked the border between Reizen’s home country and Eurote.

They surmised, accurately, that it had something to do with Reizen himself.

Their speeding paid off; they were the first team to arrive at the safe house. The jeep headed slowly up the steady incline. Snow had accrued in the gutters of the old farm house and seemed to pull the roof down sombrely over the house itself.

Without another word, Hans moved Reizen into the furthest room of the house. He didn’t have to reiterate his order that the others be kept in the dark about Reizen; his grave silences were reminder enough.

When the others arrived, they had no reason to enter Regenwalde’s annexed back room. Besides that, he held rank over all of them except for Rudolf Weber, who was also a Lieutenant General and the commanding officer of one of the teams. Weber had thin hair and a round face and, beyond getting the hell out of No Man’s Land, he couldn’t care less about their situation on the farm.

If it weren’t for Liedermann, there was every chance that Hans could have kept Taki a secret.

He saw Liedermann’s suspicion growing and changing shades as time went on. He oscillated between thoughts about reporting it to Weber and confronting Hans directly.  It would only be a matter of time.

But it didn’t matter.

By then, he and Taki would be long gone.

* * *

‘What the hell is the kid doing here?’

Haruki’s heart, which had lifted when he caught sight of the Klaus’ tan coat through the trees, immediately plummeted.

They climbed out of the jeep which they parked on the river bank. The river gushed past at top speed, carrying pockets of ice and snow.

Moriya tried explaining it again, but somehow the words didn’t emerge as eloquently as they did when he only had Azusa and Date to convince.

They each had a different relationship with the captain. Azusa, of course, knew him the most, as a result of their fateful mission in No Man’s Land. Moriya had always been wary of him and kept a respectful distance. Date, on the other hand, didn’t put a lot of effort into hiding his mistrust of the Saxon, fuelled partly by overprotectiveness where Taki was concerned.

All three, however, were equally struck by the change that had come over Klaus since they last saw him.

It was like he’d aged several years in a few short months. Whether it was due to being sent from Taki’s side or due to more recent news, there were thin lines across his forehead and around his mouth that hadn’t been there before. His eyes and hair alike were somehow duller, as though the colour had become diluted.

Even though Haruki couldn’t put his finger on the change in Klaus, it made him lose just a little more faith in the world. In what they were trying to do.

He was relieved to find the spotlight soon swung away from him; Moriya handed Klaus the paper with Haruki's code. Klaus took it and read it mutely, his eyes slowly drinking in the eastern characters.

The sun emerged sheepishly from behind clouds and lit up their little clearing by the river. Clumps of snow huddled at the bases of trees, melting in yellowish hues. Klaus took a few steps towards the river with the paper in his hand while the other four watched.

Then Haruki heard him speak the sounds out loud. He felt a spark of excitement. When Klaus read it out, it was identical to the sounds he overheard on the radio. A language that was almost the opposite of the demure, dry, unassuming softness of his own. Klaus' was strong and insistent. Rich, heavy consonants. It sounded like him, Haruki thought.

There was a short pause after he stopped speaking. Date lost what little patience he had.

‘Well? What does it say?’

‘I don't know.’ Klaus turned back around. His face, though still unsmiling, was now focused. ‘I had a feeling when I spoke to Haruki that it was in code.’

Helplessness settled in the little clearing like winter chill. All thoughts were on the commander.

‘I know someone who might be able to help,’ Klaus said. ‘I need to get to a phone.’

‘It’ll be hard to find a secure line,’ said Azusa.

‘No time to worry about that. Any line will do. Even from a bar or an inn.’ Klaus walked to the jeep. ‘What’s our stockpile?’

Moriya quickly recited his inventory as Klaus scanned the small pile of weapons in the backseat.

‘Alright,’ said Klaus. ‘Let's get going. I know somewhere nearby where we can –’

Although the captain easily outranked everyone there, Date was not comfortable with the ease with which the other two had deferred to his authority. And so he chose that moment to address what he believed to be the elephant in the room.

‘And what then?’ he interrupted. ‘We watch you get arrested by the first soldier or policeman that sees you? You’ve been exiled, you know.’

Silence.

‘Date –’ Azusa tried, sounding nervous.

‘And how are we supposed to know whether to trust you at all?’ Date continued, voice rising. ‘After everything Taki-sama said about you?

Haruki’s stomach churned again.

Klaus considered Date. Narrow, untrusting eyes and a square, stubborn jaw. They’d never shared more than a few heated looks in the past.

His words had brought to life, in clear, simple terms, something that had eaten away at him for months. And yet, when confronted with them, he suddenly knew exactly what to say.

‘If you're having second thoughts about coming with me, soldier, I understand. This mission isn't for the faint-hearted.’

‘What?’

‘That goes for you two as well. You can turn back now. Leave me everything I can fit in the sidecar and head back to the compound, if that's what you prefer. I can take it from here alone.’

Date's face contorted and Moriya heard warning bells. It was suddenly just Klaus and Date in the clearing.

‘And who the hell are you to head this mission anyway? No one appointed you head of anything.’

Moriya sighed, embarrassed by the juvenile calls.

‘I might not be Taki’s knight anymore,’ said Klaus, feeling the pain in a small, private place, but hearing his words emerge with a strength he didn’t expect. ‘But at least I was once. What about you? Did I make a mistake when I assumed just being childhood friends is a strong enough reason for you to risk your neck for him?’

Date steadily turned red. ‘We've known Taki-sama a lot longer than you have, Wolfstadt,’ he said, almost through gritted teeth.

‘That may be the case, but there's one huge difference between me and you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I never had to call him _sama_.’

 A faint smile finally crinkled the corners of Klaus’ eyes.

Date stared for a few beats before he clicked his tongue in frustration and turned away, still fuming.

Despite this, Moriya was amazed to sense that the impasse was over. In their own strange way, they'd each proved something to the other. For now, Moriya hoped, that would be it.

* * *

Klaus quickly outlined his plan. It didn't seem like much, Moriya realised. But it was all they had.

After the sidecar was loaded with grenades, Klaus finally turned his attention to Haruki, who had been dreading that moment. By then, all four of them were back in the jeep and Klaus stood by Haruki’s window.

‘You've done a lot for us, kid,’ Klaus said, his voice sounding both weathered and gentle. ‘But you can't come with us. As soon as we hit a train station, you're going back home.’

‘Klaus-sama, I can help! We've been taught to use guns in hand-to-hand combat and –’

‘No.’

Haruki heard the note of finality.

‘If anything happened to you, it would be my fault. Do you understand? That's not something I see myself handling well. Not to mention how much trouble I’ll be in with Taki. Remember how pissed he was last time I dragged you into battle? And I didn't even mean to that time.’

Haruki stared at the floor of the jeep. He imagined trudging pathetically back into the dorm, explaining to Ryoumei that he'd gotten as far as a riverbank.

Klaus seemed to read his mind. He reached through the window and tousled his hair.

‘Cheer up, kid. We have a while to go yet before we get to a train station.’

* * *

The cold mountain wind tried yet again to bring down the tiny, ancient safe house. Hans Regenwalde lay in bed and listened to it beat against the walls and whistle sombrely through the cracks in the windows.

He occasionally turned his head to stare at the dark shape on his left that was Taki. He tried to read his dreams which were largely obscured by pain and the darkness in the room.

Once he caved to temptation, feeling like a child, and crouched by Taki's bed. He put a hand on his hair. Then he moved it to his cheek where he was still sweating too much.

Hans remembered his lips. The way Taki's eyes had widened with surprise before Hans kissed them. He remembered the colours of his thoughts in the long months he’d known him. Their purity and beauty. The stuff of the gods. Maybe there was something to all that after all.

Earlier that day, their second day in the safe house, Hans told Taki that his brilliance first struck him the day after they met, when he tricked Hans into divulging information regarding the Brass special ops strike.

‘There’s something to the Reizen name,’ said Hans. ‘I thought it was all superstition. But I saw some of it with my own eyes.’

Taki had said nothing. His eyes held a cold, fiery loathing that Hans had stoically prepared for but managed to hurt nonetheless. He tried to make Taki take sips of water but he refused to move his lips. So Hans left the glass by his bedside.

_Who are you?_

Hans sighed. It was a question that cropped up between all others and one he wasn’t prepared to tackle yet.

‘Who are the others?’ Taki managed to ask aloud, his voice still weak.

That was something Hans could answer.

‘Everyone here is a westerner. They each have a good reason why they want to see their own nation fall. Politics or a personal vendetta against the government, you name it. Mussolin sought them out.’

_You, too?_

It was creeping towards uncomfortable territory but Hans tackled it.

‘I just go to the highest bidder. Both during the first war and the second, that was Mussolin. That’s how I amassed my little fortune.’

At first, Hans explained, he’d worked for Mussolin to weed out spies. His talents were obviously quite useful in that regard. Becoming a spy himself was the natural next step.

‘Mussolin will win,’ Taki said weakly, his mouth dry. ‘Why are you helping him?’

‘It’s unbelievable that you’re feeling pain to that degree and you’re still concerned about the world stage,’ said Hans, his eyes softening again in that rare way.

He tried giving Taki some of the water again and this time, Taki reluctantly lifted his head and parted his lips.

_Don’t you care?_

Hans put the glass down. He was almost curious to know whether there was a chance whether Taki’s raw intelligence or his unbending notion of justice and morality would win out. So he tried to articulate for the very first time. 

‘When a spy is as enmeshed in his guise as Klaus and I,' he began slowly. 'When his actions have caused so much devastation on both sides, his true allegiance becomes almost a question of philosophy. A more astute philosopher would say it makes no difference where his loyalty lies. I say, beneath all the layers and counter-layers, there is a small, bright kernel of truth. For Klaus, that was you. I didn’t have one. I don’t love or hate my country, or yours. I simply found a way to benefit from something that was going to happen with or without me.’

He saw Taki trying to process it.

‘I was one of those who believed there was no distinction in terms of allegiance. And yet, I found my small kernel. Strangely enough, it was the same one Klaus found.’

Taki still didn't understand. Not really.

‘Is this about him?’ _Do you hate him that much?_

A pause.

‘Klaus inadvertently led me to you,’ he said in a voice so low Taki couldn’t be sure if he heard him. ‘In a way, I’m grateful to him for that.’

He explained that it wasn’t that he’d spent the last ten years itching to see Klaus suffer.

‘I just took the coincidence as a sign. If someone had to die by my hand, why not someone he cares for? It barely mattered at the time I made the decision. But now...’

He then looked at Taki, who was overwhelmed by the sincerity in his grey eyes. Cold skin that warmed to the touch, Taki remembered suddenly.

As though he’d run out of words, Hans turned away and told him, again, to try to get some rest.

* * *

That night, as Hans crouched by his side, he was close enough to see him dream. The same one. The dream that Klaus came. An awful trick played by his mind.

_How much of what you said about Klaus was a lie?_

That was another question Hans had caught days ago. Hans had considered lying. Partly out of jealousy. Partly to spare Taki.

‘Almost all of it,’ he said simply.

He saw it. The heartbreak. Something that rivalled the physical pain of his wounds. The realisation of what he'd put Klaus through. The simple truth of Klaus' love that he'd refused to see because of his own guilt.

Hans had left the room then, suddenly unable to bear it himself.

Now, up close, he could read the pain even stronger. He felt the impotence of being able to see it but not take it for him. The stifling guilt that he had been the one that caused it.

No, he decided. If not me, if Mussolin had sent anyone else to the Fifteenth Armoured Division, Taki would be dead.

This was a sign. Their coming together was a sign, and Hans would keep him alive. Keep him safe.

He lifted his hand off Taki's hair and returned to his own bed.

* * *

The first stop was an inn where Klaus had to part with a little money before the suspicious owner let him use the phone. 

Not the time or place to be tall and blond, Klaus thought as he held the phone to his ear and dialled.

They were relieved to be in a semi-private area in the shadow of the stairwell that led to the upper rooms.

‘This is the biggest favour I'm calling in yet,’ he told the others as they milled around. ‘I don't even know if this is still his number. He’s one of the best cryptographers in our country. Worked for Enigma.’

Moriya had heard of the legendary machine that untangled the most complex of codes as though they were nothing more than shoelaces.

‘Did you work with him before you came here?’

‘Nope,’ said Klaus absently, concentrating on the ringtone, praying to any gods within earshot that he would pick up. ‘I dated his twin sister.’

A small silence fell. Moriya blinked.

‘You what?’

The line picked up and relief washed over Klaus when he heard the voice.

_‘Hello?’_

‘Hey, Freddy,’ he said, and even though none of them understood the language he was speaking, they heard a small spark of life in his tone that had been lacking all day. ‘I never got to thank you for smuggling all that beer and vodka for us after you graduated.’

 _‘Who the hell is this?’_ demanded Frederik Scholz.

‘It’s Klaus. Von Wolfstadt,’ he added.

_‘Mother of God.’_

‘I need to ask a favour, Freddy. A big one.’

_‘Last I heard you screwed off to the east.’_

‘I did. Still here. And really need your help.’

Frederik took a second for that to sink in.

_‘So you’re on their side, are you?’_

‘Sides don’t matter anymore. Do you still have access to Enigma? We need coded co-ordinates to be cracked as soon as possible. The code’s in our language, so it shouldn’t take long. Someone’s life is on the line, Fred. Please.’

It took a while for the shock and confusion to wear off. Even after that, Frederik Scholz was not to be swayed. Enigma was shut down after the end of the war, he said. And he wasn’t about to use western technology to help the east, especially not with all the recent accusations that the Alliance had assassinated the entire Reizen leadership.

Hearing Taki’s name again sent a bolt of pain through Klaus. He tried to switch gears.

‘Look, if we pull this off, there’s a small chance we’ll be able to prove that the Western Alliance had nothing to do with any of it.’

_‘What? How?’_

‘It’ll take too long to explain, Fred. Please, just trust me on this. We need you.’

Frederik fell silent. It was almost a given that that was a bold lie told in desperation.

And yet, throughout their conversation, Frederik had been forcibly reminded of walks down school hallways with the entire gang, feigning annoyance as Klaus berated them all yet again with his dreams of flying and winning wars for the west. He wondered how much had changed in ten years that Klaus would suddenly be calling him from the east in a tone that Fred would never have thought him capable of.

He then also, unexpectedly, thought about how Greta had looked at him over the years. He wondered what she would say if she were there.

 _‘Give me a day,’_ he said angrily, well aware that he could end up in prison because of a three-minute phone call from an old friend. _‘What’s your number over there? I’ll call you when I’m at Enigma.’_

The relief Klaus had felt when Fred picked up the phone now multiplied a thousandfold. Ridiculously, in that moment of all moments, he found himself fighting back tears for the first time.

The others pricked up their ears when Klaus switched to back to their language and asked Haruki to find out the number of the inn.

‘I owe you one, Freddy,’ he said weakly after he read it out.

_‘You said that about the booze, too.’_

He hung up.

* * *

The day and night that followed turned into the longest of their lives.

They rented two rooms at the inn upstairs and tried to pass the hours constructively. Instead, each fell into separate reveries about their commander. Where he was, whether he was alive, how he was doing. They hoped he knew, somehow, that they were on their way.

In the room he shared with Klaus, Haruki noticed that the blankets on Klaus’ bed were never pulled back. Each time Haruki awoke at night and rolled over, Klaus was either not there (and a quick peek over the banister found him sitting by the phone) or he sat and smoked by the windowsill, staring at nothing. Haruki felt as though he was observing the captain through a sheet of glass.

 _His love for Taki-sama,_ Haruki began to realise, though he suspected that a great deal eluded him still, _is different to our love for Taki-sama._

They each took turns waiting by the phone, aware that the innkeeper wasn’t to be trusted passing on the message if the call came through early.

The call didn't come through early. In fact, by the time the phone finally rang, it was well into the following evening.

A few minutes before it did, Klaus sat by the phone while Date headed outside to have a smoke. And then another. Moriya leaned against the wall with crossed arms. Haruki silently handed out pork buns, which made Azusa smile despite himself.

Moriya asked again how Klaus knew the cryptographer, wondering whether he’d misunderstood the first time.

‘We were in the same year in high school. But he’s something of a genius, so he graduated two years before the rest of us. Got pulled immediately into code breaking. He helped develop Enigma at the end of the first war.’ Klaus shook his head when Haruki offered him a bun. ‘Also I dated his sister.’

Moriya raised his eyebrows and pushed his glasses up his nose. Western culture, it seemed, would continue to be a mystery to him.

They even once, briefly, wondered who was behind everything. Who was sitting behind the curtains, pulling strings and watching the Reizens fall. Klaus remembered what the old man said.

‘I think Eurote has something to do with this.’

‘Eurote?’ said Azusa in surprise.

‘It's the hunch of an old spy I know,’ Klaus replied. ‘I have no idea if he's right.’

Azusa fell silent for a beat or two.

‘If that's the case, if they're to blame for all this… this… I...’

Moriya turned to him, startled by his tone.

Klaus, though, was the first to recognise the look in Azusa's eye. He suddenly remembered pulling Azusa back from certain death as they leaped off a huge water tank onto the roof of a passing train. The sheepish gratitude. Not for the first time, he felt an affinity with the soldier.

‘If there’s anything I’ve learned by now,’ he said quietly, thinking of Taki, ‘it's that we're not our countries. And we should stop trying to carry their weight by ourselves.'

They all fell silent.

That day, while they waited, only Klaus was preoccupied enough not to notice the looks that were being shot his way by various patrons. It had only been two days since the country learned about what happened to the Reizens and emotions were running high.

These emotions crystallised in the form of a large, burly worker who had been steadily getting drunker since his shift ended two hours ago. The looks he shot Klaus through the doorway, however, had been ignored up until that point. And so he decided to do something about it.

‘Haven’t you fuckers done enough?’ he demanded, suddenly eclipsing the doorway and clutching the frame for support. Klaus glanced up and took in the line-moustache above thick lips and a heavy brow. ‘What are you still doing here?’

‘That’s enough,’ Moriya said in an undertone.

Date returned from his smoke, wondering about the commotion. The drunk turned his attention to his countrymen.

‘And what about you? Turning your backs on your own country! Fucking traitors!’

A hush had fallen over the entire inn and all eyes were on the small phone alcove. The innkeeper watched from behind his counter, making no move to stop him.

Breath held, Haruki glanced between the drunk and Klaus. Klaus, who had barely reacted since the drunk started talking. Haruki braced himself for the inevitable explosion.

Moriya tried again to intervene. Again the drunk ignored him. He took a few steps towards the reticent Klaus and everyone's pulses crept upwards.

‘If it weren't for you,’ the man hollered, syllables sloshing about like the beer. ‘The emperor would still be alive! It's all your fucking fault, you and all your bloody Saxon friends!’

A little beer sloshed out of his bottle as he walked. Klaus watched him approach, eyes impassive. Haruki's mind fast forwarded. Klaus was taller but this guy might outdo him in terms of sheer weight. A brawl between them would take out a great deal of that alcove.

‘Hey! _Hey!_ What are you, too scared now to say anything? Do you even understand what I'm saying you stupid bloody Saxon –?’

Date, of all people, stepped up to the drunk and slugged him once, hard, across the jaw. The drunk didn't see it coming – no one did – and so he fell to the floor in a drunken heap without much complaint. His friends, who had been secretly hoping to see him take a swing at the Saxon, came over to drag him away.

Date massaged his fist.

Klaus raised his eyebrows at him. In the resounding silence that was slowly being filled in with regular sounds of the inn, a small grin formed on Klaus' face.

Date scowled.

‘What?'

Klaus' retort was interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone.

* * *

_'Sorry I'm late.'_

Klaus was impressed that Frederik managed to sound both out of breath and still supremely annoyed at him. He hinted at the hurdles he’d just cleared and reiterated that, for this, Klaus owed him more than he could possibly deliver.

Switches. Levers. A sound like a typewriter. Klaus wondered what the fabled machine looked like.

Klaus drew out Haruki's code. ‘Is it ready?

_‘It'll take two minutes to power up.’_

Klaus tried to take a steady breath. He stood up, the phone cradle in one hand, the black curls of the wire stretching taught across his body.

Haruki saw the paper clenched in Klaus' fist, his own handwriting just visible, and experienced a strange moment of surreality.

Klaus heard Frederick let out a single, tense exhale. 

We're losing our minds waiting for a machine to wake up, he thought. He cast about for something to say.

‘How’s Greta doing?’

_‘She’s fine. Married with a son. Kid looks just like her.’_

Klaus heard something purring and then roaring to life in the background, like a monster reluctantly being prodded awake.

 _‘She’s off doing something or other,’_ Fred continued, sounding distracted. _‘Have you heard of this new women’s rights movement? Suffrage?’_

‘Can’t say I have.’

_‘Greta’s nuts about it. She’s leading the charge.’_

Klaus smiled. ‘Sounds about right.’

_‘I don’t know why I’m helping you, Klaus. I’m still not crazy about the fact that you fucked my sister and then dumped her.’_

‘Hey now, she’s the one who dumped me.’

_‘Whatever.’_

Haruki's heart lifted again, relieved to hear that Klaus, even if only for a moment, even if in a language he didn't understand, sounded more like himself.

The thought had barely crossed his mind before a shadow fell over Klaus' face again. He was suddenly reading aloud, slowly and clearly, from Haruki's piece of paper. 

The silence afterward lasted almost twenty minutes. The sounds of the inn came from very far away.

And then Klaus was talking again, but in their language this time. Azusa, who had been waiting, carefully took down coordinates on the back of the map he'd kept on hand.

He stared at the numbers and frowned, realising he didn't even need to turn the map over to know where they were.

After he and Klaus exchanged a nod, Klaus muttered a final, sincere thanks to Frederik Scholz and hung up the phone. 

'What's wrong?' Moriya asked, who had noticed the change that had come over Azusa's face.

'It's in No Man’s Land,' Azusa replied.

* * *

On the third day, Taki awoke in an empty room and experimentally shifted his weight on the bed, hoping Hans wouldn’t notice. The pain had only marginally decreased, even with Hans’ meticulous care. He knew he needed a proper hospital and real medication.

He knew he’d broadcast all of his wishes. The ones of escaping. The ones where they would be discovered. The ones where Taki died, whether by Hans’ hand or of his wounds.

That last wish had appeared to greatly upset Hans.

Hans came to know it when he finally broke to him, gently, how he planned to slip both himself and Taki out from under Mussolin’s radar.

‘My estate isn't in my country. It's somewhere else entirely. South. No such thing as winter there.’

He then took a moment to recall the memory that wasn’t his.

‘Klaus wanted to take you to his property, didn’t he? Golden fields.’ He smiled. ‘Quite striking. Mine isn't quite as peaceful, but the views are spectacular. Most importantly, no one from here or the west or Eurote would find it in a million years.’

 _I would rather die_ , was Taki’s single thought.

Hans turned away from that flash of red, knowing he meant it.

Now, as Taki tried to inch himself out of bed again and was held back by the pain and the periodic morphine overdoses, he wondered if he had allowed himself to feel a stab of guilt. Hans, he knew, in his own terrible way, had prevented Taki’s death. Taki knew that he lay wounded in a pit of snakes, and that it was Hans who was sheltering him from them. And from others out there like Mussolin who might want him dead. It was Hans who –

The door opened and Taki tried to wipe those thoughts from his mind. He covered them with thoughts of Klaus, which were only too easy to summon.

* * *

The second and final stop before No Man's Land was a small town a few hours east where Azusa had a contact who could procure them some hand-held radios; the only thing they hadn’t been able to take from the compound.

That town, Haruki found out to his dismay, had a train station.

They set off that evening as soon as they gathered their gear together at the inn. The plan was to head for No Man's Land at first light.

Klaus thought back to their conversation in the little alcove. He and Azusa had exchanged a telling look. The last time they were there...

‘So,’ Klaus said at length. ‘If any of you still have hang-ups about the impurity of that place or whatnot, now's the time to –’

Date bristled.

‘You're not shaking us that easily. If Taki-sama's there, that's where we're going.’

Klaus looked at Moriya, who remembered echoes of his mother's warnings, the legends taught at school; a history and a reality that was just as real to him as anything else.

None of it stood a chance against the image of a young kimono-bedecked Taki giving him a small smile.

He nodded once.

The following morning, at the crack of dawn, the jeep and motorbike were parked side by side at a train station. The other three had gone to meet Azusa's contact. Klaus bought Haruki's ticket for him and stood with him on the platform.

‘I've been meaning to ask you. How did you even end up hearing the transmission that night?’

‘I – I was on the radio pretty much every night.’

‘Doing what?’

Haruki blushed.

‘Listening for you. You know, just in case you were within range and needed... needed recon about the situation at the compound.’

‘And because of that you happened to overhear the code?’ Klaus chuckled quietly and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, wondering about the gods after all. ‘I told you I stopped believing in coincidences, right?’

A little relieved, Haruki gave a weak smile.

‘Yes, sir.’

Klaus’ eyes twinkled. ‘I have a feeling you'll go places, Haruki Yamamoto.’

Neither of them knew Moriya had had the same thought not long ago.

Haruki still looked crumpled. Klaus felt a strange tug at his heartstrings.

‘Don't be angry because I'm sending you home, okay? I meant what I said in the cell. It means a lot having you on my side.’

‘I'm not angry,’ said Haruki, a little stunned that he had to say something like that at all.

‘Good.’

Haruki’s train chugged up to the platform, belching smoke. Klaus ruffled the kid’s hair again, for longer this time, and felt a familiar affection when Haruki absently reached up to fix it.

‘Okay, I've got to go see a man about a radio. Make sure you’ve got yours on you when you’re home. Stay on the air for us.’

‘I will, sir.’

* * *

A few hours later, a single jeep and a single motorbike crossed the border and plunged into No Man’s Land.

The terrain stretched into the distance in various shades of grey and white. All bleak, all unforgiving. And a few hours in the distance, the hint of mountains in soft watercolours - their destination.

Klaus' hair and coat whipping backwards in the breeze was the only indication that he hadn't been turned to stone on his bike.

Moriya turned from the window to look at the other two in the jeep. Date's focus was also on the landscape ahead but Azusa caught his gaze. Those clear blue eyes, ones that had recently lamented their Eurotean ancestry, always struck Moriya. The look they exchanged was heavy with meaning.

And so they flew over a land that was once pure, then cursed, and now concealed something precious. 

* * *

Hans was almost proud of how finely he'd honed his skills. He predicted the time of Liedermann's betrayal down to the minute. It took him three days, which was a fair amount of time for speculation and reflection, Hans mused, if one suspected one's commanding officer of treachery.

In preparation, after waiting for an inconspicuous moment around ten minutes before Liedermann told the others and aroused suspicion, he'd taken one of the three jeeps parked outside and driven it around to the back of the property, just shy of the tree line.

He cast a quick almost wistful gaze over the frozen lake. It reminded him of a far more stark and unforgiving version of his estate.

Then he'd gone back to the annexed room at the back of the property.

Taki seemed to sense that something was different. He tried to lift his head.

‘We’re leaving,’ said Hans.

Taki’s blood ran cold. _No –_

And then Hans stopped. His gaze was fixed on the far wall as though he’d heard something. The way he slowly closed his eyes made Taki feel a different kind of fear. He looked down and his stomach lurched.

The other officers had gathered at the door, Weber at the front, Liedermann not far behind. They gaped at the young commander from the East, whom everyone believed dead, lying in their comrade’s bedroom, rigged up to an IV drip.

Despite having accurately predicted the moment of Liedermann's betrayal, Hans had underestimated the time it would take for the others to rally.

No time at all, as it turned out. No plan, no strategy. Just guns.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Weber, staring at Taki. ‘Are you insane, Regenwalde? What the hell was your plan here?’

‘It doesn't concern you,’ Hans said evenly, though he could see that words were no use. Weber had made his mind up already. Hans saw what Weber saw; Taki would die in that bed and, as far as Weber was concerned, Hans may or may not.

So Hans made that decision for him.

He turned to face them fully and drew his gun. He held it casually by his side but his stance between Taki and the soldiers couldn’t have conveyed his message with more force.

Taki’s heart hammered.

The others tensed. Weber sighed, as if disappointed, as if wishing such a minor annoyance hadn't marred what had otherwise been a well-executed mission. He clicked the safety off his gun.

Shame, Hans thought, on the point of raising his own gun. I would have preferred to die somewhere with –

And then came the explosions. Two of them, one after the other in quick succession. The ground shook and the officers’ faces perfectly captured the shock they felt within.

Hans knew what was happening before any of them.

Three days, he thought with a small smile, lowering his gun. It took the Mad Dog just three days to find his master, even at the ends of the Earth.


	17. Somewhere With a Better View

Both the jeeps in the driveway were up in flames. A third and fourth grenade exploded near the front porch, though care had been taken to avoid the house itself.

Klaus had zoomed right past the house after launching both grenades so he had no need to worry about the debris. Date, however, who manned the jeep, had to wait until the flying bits of metal and glass settled before bringing the jeep to a skidding stop between the flames and the house. There, he, Moriya and Azusa threw themselves out of the jeep and rolled behind the tires and hood, guns pointed at the front of the house.

Meanwhile, the tires of Klaus' bike and sidecar sent snow flying as he veered around the back of the house, making a beeline for the backdoor. There, the goggles came off and he sprinted up the steps.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a third jeep parked further out, closer to the tree line.

He had grenades on him. Destroying all their enemies’ means of escape was a wise precaution. But, his first priority being Taki, he turned back to the door.

A solid kick brought it down.

* * *

_A FEW HOURS AGO_

Towards late afternoon, they’d arrived on the outskirts of the property, taking care to kill the engine from a safe distance. From there, they staked out the house through binoculars from the tree line. Azusa reported nine, perhaps ten officers inside. No sign of Taki, though he couldn’t be sure.

Klaus saw the dark, hunkering mass of the farmhouse and his entire body filled with the need to blow it sky high and pull Taki from the dregs.

Trying to come up with a plan of action lying face-down in snow with the life of their commander on the line was beyond stressful. There were only four of them and nine or ten of the enemy. Plus the safety of Taki to consider. They could hardly start throwing grenades through windows.

Plans were suggested in urgent undertones. Perhaps they could remain in the treeline with the single sniper rifle they’d brought, taking the time to take each one out individually. Or waiting it out until the inevitable supply guy came around and trying to use him somehow. Even just taking some recon photos and coming back another day.

Date listened, getting more and more frustrated. His only contribution had been a steady stream of muttered curses.

‘What's your suggestion then?’ Moriya finally asked, even his legendary patience beginning to fray at the edges.

Date clicked his tongue irritably. Strategy had never been one of his strengths.

‘I don’t know. How about… the three of us take the front to pull their fire while Klaus goes around back.’

Moriya lined up a scathing reply but it died on his lips. The simplicity of it struck them.

Date didn’t notice that he’d made an impression.

‘I mean, we could throw a few grenades at their jeeps as the first distraction, you know. And so they can't escape. Then we pull up and start firing at them from behind the jeep while Klaus takes the bike around back. Then he grabs Taki-sama and we all go home.’

Silence followed his words.

‘Okay,’ said Klaus, getting up from the ground. ‘That's the plan.’

Date was more surprised than pleased. Azusa gave him a smile that made him blush.

* * *

Klaus entered with gun held in both hands, pointed straight down, left shoulder leading the way. No thundering feet greeted him. They must be busy getting nailed by Date, Moriya and Azusa, Klaus thought with a flare of pride.

And then from around the corner, a cartridge in his mouth and gun in his hand, stumbled a soldier. It took Klaus a few moments to recognise him as Gunter Straffberg, Hans' third in command.

The surprised look stayed on his face when Klaus shot him twice in the chest. He fired once more for good measure as he stepped over the body.

Then he slipped past each room, seeing much of the same thing in each. Twin beds, some of the blankets thrown back. Nothing to indicate that Taki had been there.

And then he squeezed through a narrow hallway into a tiny, musty room that was annexed to the main house. A makeshift IV drip. Blood on the sheets. But no Taki.

Klaus stared. Something splintered in him at the sight of the bed.

He went back into the hallway and bellowed Taki's name.

* * *

Minutes ago, after the explosions drew the officers out of the small annexed room, Hans moved at the speed of light. He slid the IV drip out of Taki’s arm and administered one final, heavy dose of morphine. He then covered Taki once again in his thick, black coat and picked him up.

Taki’s wounds called out in alarm but he couldn’t make a sound.

Part of the hallway had already caved in. From Hans’ assessment, the explosions hadn’t physically hit the house, but its structure was so weak that the shockwaves had been enough to make parts of it buckle.

Including, Hans discovered, the ceiling above the access hatch to the basement. The basement through which he'd been planning to make their escape.

He lowered Taki to the ground and began to pull the rubble off the door. He’d just about cleared it when gunfire began sounding from the front of the house. And suddenly, there was the unmistakeable sound of a motorbike.

The sound temporarily distracted him.

Which is why he didn’t notice Alric Liedermann coming up behind him, nor the sound of the safety being unclicked.

The bullet ripped through his right shoulder and dropped him to the floor. He turned in time with his gun in hand to send Liedermann scurrying for cover. Nearly blinded by pain, he gasped and crawled to Taki. With an inhuman effort, he gathered him in his arms again and lowered himself into the hatch.

When Liedermann peered around the corner, they both seemed to have vanished under the rubble.

* * *

Liedermann then saw the back door get kicked down with a noise to rival the gunfire on the other side of the house. He caught a glimpse of yellow hair and an implausibly huge frame and ducked out of sight just in time, heart pounding.

Where the fuck, he wondered, did he come from?

As he heard Wolfstadt shoot Straffberg and begin moving from room to room, an idea occurred to him. Liedermann had heard the motorbike roar around back. And the situation he’d just left in the front of the house was dire. Their jeeps were all gone.

Liedermann waited until Klaus was in the annexed room before he slipped down the hallway and out the back door.

* * *

Even through his pain, Taki could sense Hans’. His breathing was laboured, his usually composed face contorted in pain. At the bottom of the basement stairs, Taki’s weight finally proved to be too much. He lowered Taki to the floor again to catch his breath. Blood poured in a steady stream from his shoulder.

Hans stared across to the other side of the basement. Not long ago, he hadn’t thought twice about striding quickly across the floor, climbing the stairs to the basement egress that led to the surface. There, his jeep waited for them. Waiting to take them south and far away.

Now, the length of the cellar seemed interminable. He panted and brushed his fringe back from his forehead, trying to focus.

Taki struggled to keep his eyes open. With one hand on the bottom of the basement step, he managed to turn his head and lift his upper body, trying to fight the familiar swirls of morphine in his head.

Hans turned to him.

At that moment, a voice boomed from somewhere above.

_‘TAKI!’_

They both froze.

Hans closed his eyes and felt it. Surges of gold, but not like he’d seen them before. These were like lava. Fury and desperation.

Taki, meanwhile, wasn’t prepared to believe the voice hadn’t sprung from his morphine-addled mind.

_Is that…_

A small blue note cutting through the fiery gold. Hans opened his eyes and looked at Taki again.

_Is that him?_

More gunfire. A steady patter of it, which from that distance, seemed as innocuous as rain. Hans looked again across the cellar floor. He took the time to notice the objects that had been moved to the side. Ancient wooden shelves packed with irregular ceramic bowls. Squat kettles and crockery. Wagon wheels and even disassembled pieces of carts. The testimony of an entire age, Hans thought, lying here quietly under the raging destruction.

He couldn’t cross it. Not anymore. Not with Taki to bear.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He said it, he realised, just to see the look on Taki’s face. The look that swam from behind all the pain and disorientation. The final push he needed.

 _Please_. It was a single colour. Bright and hot and desperate. _Please._

Perhaps it was because of the pain in his shoulder, but Hans uncharacteristically struggled to hold onto any one thought. First he was back in his estate, whose open spaces were suddenly no longer calming. They now seemed empty. Then he was back in the stone holding cell with Taki and the young commander was in the processing of fooling him, of all people, without even being aware of his gift. Then he was watching Klaus score a goal in the summer heat. And then he saw the lavender of Taki’s sisters. The invitation to visit the green of the Reizen residence. To see the swaying wisteria for himself.

He moved to Taki’s side. Taki, whose eyes still held the one thought.

‘Taki-sama,’ said Hans, his breathing hitched. ‘Do you remember what you thought in your room? About how things might have turned out if I’d been at Luckenwalde?’

Taki stared at him in confusion.

And then, like he’d experienced a flash of understanding, like Hans’ power had worked the other way just that once, something changed in his face.

Such was the involuntary nature of thoughts that Hans knew Taki would have no choice but to imagine it as soon as he spoke the words. And yet he wondered if a part of Taki also did it on purpose.

Hans, not Klaus, had been his roommate at Luckenwalde. Followed him silently back to his country. Fought silently at his side. Listened and obeyed silently to his every command. How different things were.

_Imagine the impact it would have if just one person were to lend them a kind ear. Without judgment. With an open heart and mind. It might even change the course of history._

With that, Hans was gone. Taki craned his neck to watch him staggering up the stairs on the other side of the basement. A whirl of light and snow burst through when he climbed through the egress, and then everything went dark again.

Taki breathed in the sudden stillness.

* * *

Everywhere Klaus looked there was only rubble and empty rooms.

Another officer blundered down the hallway, presumably to reload his weapon, and Klaus took him down automatically, barely even noticing he was there.

The hand-held radio at his hip was insistent.

_‘Klaus, we're running out of ammo so we're going to set off another grenade. Stay clear of the front of the house.'_

He didn't even give Moriya a _Roger that_.

He switched it off. He blocked it all out. The radio. The gunfire. The shouts.

He focused on hearing the voice that had called to him through the airwaves in the middle of battle. The one that brought him back from the brink of death as he lay by the side of a river. The one that murmured his name in the dim blue light of his room.

And he heard it.

He spun around and went back towards the back of the house, past the entrance to the annexed room. Rubble on the floor. And something that looked like the handle to a door in the floor.

* * *

Taki had said his name in a voice so weak he barely could hear it himself. 

He cursed his helplessness. His weakness, both at that moment and before. He had no one to blame but himself for the state he was in. Everything was his fault.

His strength in the hull of Murakumo, the orders he yelled through the radio came to him then as though from a past life. _Don’t cry, Taki-sama_ , Master Torieda had said. _You’re a pillar of strength for our people._ He was glad no one could see him then.

He was still wrapped in Hans’ coat, he noticed. The morphine now came to claim him in larger and larger waves. The next one would submerge him.

Taki was on the point of passing out again, eyes closed, when the ground shook again and a brilliant flash of light lit up the world beyond his eyelids. So he opened them.

Klaus was on the stairs to the basement, backlit by the fleeting, fiery explosion of the world above.

Footsteps down the stairs that Taki felt throughout his body.

And then Klaus had taken him in his arms.

* * *

‘I heard you.’

_It was like the cry of a little bird._

‘I don't fucking know how. But I heard you.’

He only wasted a moment there, in an ancient cellar in No Man’s Land, holding Taki to his chest before he got to his feet again. Any longer, he suspected, and he wouldn’t have been able to get up at all. 

Taki breathed him in, again unwilling just yet to acknowledge that it had actually happened, as Klaus bolted back up the stairs, three at a time.

Another explosion shook the house. Klaus waited for the dust to settle before continuing.

By the time he reached the hallway leading to the backdoor, he finally caught on to the extent of Taki’s pain. He barely made a sound but Klaus felt it through the tension of his body. And then the look on his face when Klaus glanced down.

He crouched in the hallway and propped Taki up against his knee. Sweat and flowers, Klaus thought. Always flowers. Hair drenched in sweat. Eyes unfocused and pupils dilated. Klaus pulled aside the black coat and searched for the source of pain. In a moment of shock and helplessness, he saw blood streaming from a wound above Taki’s left hip.

And he was passing out.

‘Hey, hey.’ The slap on Taki’s face was not at all gentle and startled him awake. ‘None of that now.’

Klaus’ voice shook but he tried to keep it light for Taki's sake.

‘Don't you go passing out on me right after I went to all this trouble to find you. Do you know how annoying Date can be in large doses?' 

He began unwrapping the bandages of his arm, suddenly grateful he’d caved to Azusa’s insistence and replaced them before they left the inn.

As he wrapped it around Taki's hip, the blood simply kept soaking through. He kept adding layers.

Meanwhile, for Taki, Klaus’ smell was the only thing that lifted that moment from another cruel dream.

‘You came.’

_Even after everything I did._

Klaus only just heard him. He kept talking just to keep him there. His voice had stopped shaking but his hands appeared to have taken over on that front.

‘If I find out there was even a second you thought I wasn't coming, I'll be pretty fucking annoyed.’

Taki was too exhausted for tears. There was only numb, aching disbelief.

Which quickly turned to fear. A tan coat drenched in blood.

‘You shouldn't have come.’ His voice didn’t rise above a murmur. ‘They'll kill you.’

‘They'll have to go through everyone outside first.’

‘Who –?’

‘I couldn’t throw an army together in time, but the team outside is the next best thing. Trust me.’

Taki grunted in pain as Klaus roughly tried to tie off the bandages, cursing his fingers. Though the blood was still visible, after several layers the seepage was fairly weak.

Sweat coated Taki's face and his eyes were still unfocused. He was paler than Klaus had ever seen him, and knowing him, it was a safe bet that he was always in a great deal more pain than he let on.

Klaus' throat constricted painfully. He couldn't tear his eyes from him and yet it hurt to look at him. He remembered the iron grip on his heart when he first heard of Taki’s death on a live broadcast. That feeling and Taki’s pain now combined in a charging current.

In the absence of being able to take Taki’s pain for his own he channelled it elsewhere.

In his mind it wasn't even rage. It was the simple image of Hans lying dead at his feet. As far as he was concerned, it had already happened.

* * *

He often wondered whether what happened next was due to his distracted state or whether Liedermann really was that shrewd.

Either way, he didn’t expect the heavy blow to the back of his head as he exited the back door. His gun went flying and he only just managed to hold onto Taki as his knees hit the ground.

Head throbbing, he looked up into the barrel of a gun.

‘Keys,’ Liedermann said sharply.

Klaus tried to blink through the sharp bursts of pain in his head.

‘What?’

‘The keys to the bike. Right now.’

Klaus glanced over at the bike and sidecar.

He also suddenly noticed that the other jeep was gone. The one that had been parked a little further out. The one that had been parked, he then realised, right near where the other basement exit would have led.

Hans.

He turned back to Liedermann.

‘I lost them.’

Liedermann’s eyes flashed.

Klaus held Taki closer and wished he’d never switched off his radio. The other three would still be out the front, waiting for word that he’d found Taki. How close he’d gotten suddenly hit him with full force.

Even though he carefully removed the keys from his coat pocket and tossed them over to Liedermann, Klaus wasn’t at all surprised when the safety clicked off the gun and Liedermann took a step closer.

Klaus watched him approach, his gaze fierce and unblinking.

When the shot came, however, it was Liedermann who cried out in pain.

He sank to the ground, dropping his gun, and clutched his leg. Klaus didn’t stop to think. He got up with Taki still pressed against him, grabbed his gun and spun back around, training it on Liedermann.

That was when he saw who fired the shot.

And his jaw dropped.

* * *

Moriya had seen it out of the corner of his eye a few minutes ago. Something climbing out of the back of the jeep and taking off around the side of the house, crouched low to avoid the crossfire. His stomach flipped over.

‘How the _fuck_ did the kid get here?’

The other two were momentarily stunned; they’d never heard Moriya swear before.

‘Klaus!’ Moriya yelled into the radio. ‘Klaus, can you hear me?’

But his radio had been switched off.

It had been surprisingly easy as far as logistics were concerned. All Haruki had needed was the courage to actually go through with it. All of their weapons were in the backseat, so he hoped no one would think to look in the space in the back of the jeep where he huddled under the weapons tarpaulin. No one did.

He remained there during the hours-long drive to No Man’s Land. He crouched in silence when the jeep was abandoned while they did recon and gripped Klaus’ gun when they took off again, suddenly at great speed. He only sprang out when they came to a stop, after he heard the first grenades explode and Klaus’ bike take off. He was driven only by the innate conviction that Klaus was where he needed to be.

Haruki ran right around the house and saw the bike parked near the back door. Then he spied an enemy officer coming out of the house and immediately flattened himself against the wall, the surge of adrenaline so strong it narrowed his vision to a point.

He watched and waited and, after inspecting the bike closely, the officer seemed to do the same. Then Haruki watched as Klaus, holding the commander in his arms, emerged from the back door only to fall to his knees before the officer.

Again, Haruki drew back into the shadows of the house, his breathing loud and ragged. Now that the time had come, the fear was threatening to blot everything else out. He realised he was miles and miles from his dorm room, where he and Ryoumei had stayed up late, rocking with silent laughter over some stupid joke or other.

Then he remembered. He remembered being face to face with enemy soldiers that day on the battlefield with Klaus. He remembered how Klaus had suddenly risen beside him, like Haruki had dreamt it, taken them down with a few shots and saved Haruki’s life. Haruki remembered how Klaus had then called his master to let him know he heard him.

He remembered his own words, spoken almost desperately through the door of Klaus' shed.

_You gave me this gun, but I couldn’t use it. I was paralysed with fear. I want to become stronger. Strong enough to never again cower when I am called upon to fight._

_Strong enough to protect what is dear to me._

And so, when he heard the soldier demand the keys from Klaus and the unmistakable sound of the safety being uncocked, he stepped out of the shadows, holding Klaus’ gun as steadily as he could.

* * *

‘ _Haruki?_ ’

It was uncannily similar to the moment he held Taki in the cellar. Combat mode kicked in and Klaus didn’t let himself dwell on the unreality of it any longer than necessary.

The kid looked petrified, Klaus thought, almost feeling the urge to smile.

‘Get in the damn sidecar,’ he ordered. ‘Right now, Cadet!’

White-faced, still shocked at the sight of Liedermann groaning and bleeding in the snow, Haruki complied.

Klaus checked Taki’s face. His eyes were still open, he saw with immense relief, and his breath warm on Klaus’ chest. He felt hope for the first time, and in that moment did he realise that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he really didn’t have much to begin with.

Heart expanding in his chest, he mounted the bike as Haruki buckled in beside him.

‘Taki?’

Taki tilted his head up at the sound of his voice, eyes dull but receptive.

‘I’m going to need to you to hold on. Can you do that?’

A slow nod. His hands clenched Klaus’ coat. One of Klaus’ arms secured him while the other hand gunned the bike to life.

He switched his radio back on.

* * *

The others had been dreading the worst when his voice finally came through.

 _‘I have Taki,’_ he said. _‘And the kid, too. Give us some cover to get away before you follow.’_ A pause. _‘But maybe give them a bit of hell first.’_

Azusa, Date and Moriya took a moment to look at each other. Kimonos, mud and dead crayfish, Moriya thought. Then the bike zoomed past and they caught a glimpse of a tan coat, a black coat and a small figure in the sidecar. They zipped through the snow and into the trees.

The three of them turned back to the house. Their grenades flew through the air without restraint.

* * *

The bike sped along icy roads and terrains for almost ten minutes without incident. 

Barren, desolate, harsh, cursed, whatever, Klaus thought. Perhaps it was the forgiving purity of the snow that graced the land. Or perhaps it was because of what he was holding. Either way, the place suddenly didn’t seem too bad.

The cold air seemed to revive Taki just that bit more. He kept his eyes open for longer bouts at a time. The grip on Klaus’ coat was a little stronger. He was going to make it, Klaus realised. He was going to hold on until they reached a hospital.

The only thing that cast a shadow over that moment was the image of a missing jeep. A black snake. He tried to push that regret from his mind. It didn’t matter, really, in the grand scheme of things. And anyway, if Taki didn’t want Klaus by his side, there was the rest of his life he could dedicate to hunting Hans down.

Thoughts like those knocked about in his mind in numb relief as they made their way down the sharp, perilous incline in the mountainside (a lot worse going down than coming up, Klaus thought) and turned the corner.

A jeep.

Battered and broken, its front a crumpled mess. Apparently having spun around a great deal before coming to a rest.

And the shadow of someone inside.

The bike came to a screeching halt.

* * *

Haruki’s skin prickled in the sudden silence. After the tumult at the farmhouse, the stillness had a strained, eerie quality to it. He watched the captain warily as the biting cold wind whipped around the mountainside.

Taki recognised the look in Klaus’ eye. He turned his head and saw the jeep. A sense of dread came over him.

Even through the morphine haze and the searing pain, he tried.

‘Klaus,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’

At that, Klaus drew his gaze away from the jeep and searched Taki’s face. To his surprise, he no longer felt any jealousy. Not even any anger.

Only guilt. Guilt that he’d taken so long, let Taki suffer for so long, that he could now feel this way about someone who’d hurt him so much.

‘If it weren’t for him, I’d be dead,’ Taki murmured, frustration mounting, knowing there was no way he could convey, in his current state, the significance of what had happened over the past few days. ‘Please.’

Klaus pressed his chin to Taki's forehead. His expression hadn't changed.

‘Haruki,’ he said finally, his voice quiet. ‘Move over a little.’

He lowered Taki gingerly into the sidecar. Then he got off the bike and walked towards the jeep.

‘Klaus…’

But only Haruki heard him.

* * *

The pain in his shoulder and the last images he’d seen in Taki were the only things on Hans’ mind as he sped down the mountainside.

So strong were they that when the tires slipped on the ice and the world spun out of his control, it didn’t seem to have much of an impact by comparison.

The inertia had launched him to the side where he’d held on without sustaining many more injuries. The jeep itself though, he knew, was done for.

He knew he could escape. He knew he had a small chance on foot.

But at that point, a familiar defeatism, one he hadn’t experienced since high school, hurtled across the years and found him again. And with it, he almost felt a sense of peace.

He didn’t even have long to wait. He heard the bike, saw gold and blue, long before they came around the corner.

When Klaus reached through the door and pulled him out into the cold, Hans tried to block out the hatred. He wanted Taki’s reveries to be his last thought before he died. Luckily, the heavy blow to his face helped, as did the kick to his stomach which brought him to the ground. Purple.

He coughed and curled in only to feel another kick. Red that time.

He was hauled upright and Klaus’ fist smashed into his jaw again. And again. Lime green, he thought, but this time there wouldn’t be time to bruise.

Klaus then held him by his collar against the battered jeep. Gold eyes stared into grey. Not unlike a night long ago, Hans thought. He smiled.

And then he heard. Or rather, he saw. And his smile vanished.

There was hatred, of course. But that was only the layer on top, effervescent and strong. Beneath that were other layers. Hardened ones, ones that Hans had somehow missed. Emotions that Klaus had apparently turned over a great deal over the years without his knowledge.

At the bottom of it all was a hardened layer of guilt.

The guilt of having turned his back on someone who’d needed him. Guilt over the knowledge that he’d had a hand in an injustice small enough that he could ignore it and grave enough that he’d never quite forgiven himself for it.

The knowledge that this pain may have contorted into something else over the years. That somehow, somewhere along the way, he was to blame for everything that had happened to Hans. To Taki.

It was a terrible, deep-seeded guilt that had taken on many different forms since Hans was thrown in their midst months ago.

For Hans, the physical pain almost receded completely in the wake of these fresh, entirely unexpected colours.

He felt winded. He searched Klaus' face, trying to understand what would happen next.

And then, swimming to the foreground, there was the single image of Taki. Taki’s pain.

And, finally, the image of Hans lying dead at Klaus’ feet.

Klaus stared at him, his gaze calm and focused, for a moment longer. Then he stepped back and drew his gun.

Hans almost closed his eyes but changed his mind at the last second. He looked over Klaus’ shoulder at the snow-swept plains of No Man’s Land.

The line came to Taki suddenly, out of nowhere. Something Hans had said almost in passing long ago.

_I’d prefer to die somewhere with a better view._

Haruki squeezed his eyes shut.

The shot didn’t echo as loudly as he thought.

* * *

They made it to the bottom of the mountain and took off across the patchy forest at its base.

Klaus, focused only on what lay ahead and not the body he'd left on a cold mountainside, thought he sensed the beginnings of a blizzard. The snow was whipped into a frenzy between the trees. Taki shivered and Klaus awkwardly pulled the black coat tighter around him.

Then he pulled the bike off the path and found shelter behind a narrow thicket. The wind still found them but the snowfall was staggered by the canopy. There, he stopped the bike, pulled off his own coat and wrapped Taki in it as well.

Haruki watched, concerned for Klaus who now wore only his jacket, but didn’t say anything. 

‘We’ll wait here for the others,’ said Klaus. ‘Taki can’t handle the rest of the way in this blizzard. We’ll have to put him in the jeep.’

The grip on his shirt, Klaus noted with relief, was still strong.

He then realised Taki was trying to say something. His lips were numb with cold.

‘If you can’t talk, don’t push yourself,’ Klaus said. He then smiled. ‘Didn’t you say that to me once? Guess I'm returning the favour.’

To his shock, Klaus saw tears leaking down Taki’s face, falling into his hair. His stomach lurched when he wondered if it was because of what he’d just done to Hans.

‘Klaus.’

Taki's voice was like Klaus had never heard it before. Like it came from a place Taki had kept hidden until that very moment.

‘Klaus, the reason why I wanted you to come with me. Why I made you my knight.’

There was the smallest of pauses. And then Klaus’ heart was pounding loud enough to hear over the wind.

‘It’s because I couldn't bear the thought of not being with you. Even though I knew it meant I couldn't have you like I wanted, I still wanted you near me.' Taki struggled, feeling like his words were about to drop something and break it so that he could never piece it together again. 'And I was so afraid to tell you what being my knight meant that I – I let you keep thinking what you wanted until it was too late.’

The wintry land around them fell away. Taki’s grip tightened and the tears kept pouring.

‘I was being selfish. I hurt you so many times. I've put you in harm's way so many times –’

‘Taki –’

‘And you knew all along about Hans and I didn't listen.’

‘Stop.’

‘I – Klaus, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for everything.’

‘It's okay, Taki,’ said Klaus. He tried blinking back tears but found that he couldn’t. He cried and then smiled at the fact that he was crying. Everything he’d held together since he was sent away now threatened to come apart. ‘There's nothing to forgive.’

‘I'm sorry,’ Taki insisted, his voice breaking.

Klaus kissed him. He pulled Taki close, his body still wrapped in both coats, and the falling, darting snow was replaced by wisteria as effortlessly as though it had been dying to reveal its secret.

* * *

Haruki’s pulse had hammered in his ears while the commander spoke and he had tried to focus his attention elsewhere. He also felt his throat ache when he saw the captain crying. 

And still he wasn’t prepared for the kiss. In reality, nothing on Earth could have prepared him for it.

In that moment, Haruki Yamamoto’s small world changed. Everything he thought he understood suddenly didn’t seem to have any weight or bearing.

Finally pulling away, Klaus held Taki’s face and pressed his lips to his forehead, tears still leaking.

It took him a long time to even remember the cadet, who had surreptitiously turned his face away.

Klaus ran a hand over his face and cleared his throat. The kid's ears were red, Klaus realised.

'Kid. Grab the radio and head on over to the tree line. Make sure you’re wrapped up first. See if you can catch the others when they come into range.'

Still shell-shocked, Haruki took the radio Klaus passed him.

‘Yes, sir.’

Klaus looked at him and Haruki tried to hold his gaze.

'I can trust you with that, right?'

Haruki glanced at Taki and then back at Klaus, understanding that he was talking about more than the radio.

‘Yes, sir,’ he repeated.

Klaus’ smile was familiar. As was the wink.

‘Thanks, kid.’

Haruki took a second too long to react. It was enough time to see Klaus turn back to Taki. Then Haruki blinked, jumped out of the sidecar and headed for the path. His heart was pounding.

And, for some reason, sinking.

It would take him a while to understand why.


	18. Sunlit Sheets

Moriya drove them at breakneck speed to the nearest military hospital, which took a little over three hours. Taki’s condition ebbed and flowed in that time, along with Klaus’ anxiety. 

As soon as they drew up to the outpost, Klaus lifted Taki from the backseat and led the way, which was a small miscalculation. He was immediately greeted with suspicion and even a raised gun or two. Almost too tired to care, Klaus would have stormed past and caused a scene had Azusa and Moriya not been there to smooth things over.

When a stretcher was brought out and Taki was lowered to it, his eyes flashed open just once and, for a few seconds, he refused to let go of Klaus’ shirt.

This left Klaus baffled and even more anxious.

‘I'm right behind you, Taki. Not going anywhere.’

He followed them until they reached the infirmary, at which point he was forced to hover outside.

From there, after Taki was stabilised, he was driven back to the Fifteenth Armoured Division. He was still heavily under sedation, they said, but stable enough to go back home.

Klaus, Moriya, Azusa, Date and Haruki followed the whole way.

Again like the spread of a wildfire, the news of Commander Taki Reizen’s return from the dead consumed the nation.

It was like they’d won the war all over again.

* * *

Second-Lieutenant Suguri could have sworn that he travelled back in time when Taki opened his eyes and asked for Klaus before even fully coming to consciousness. Suguri could only hope that Klaus hadn’t somehow wound up in a holding cell again, getting cane-whipped by Hasebe.

He remembered fighting back tears when the commander arrived at the infirmary. He immediately ordered for him to be moved to his office where he could keep a closer eye on him around the clock and so Taki could have some much-needed privacy. The reporters at the compound’s entrances had become creative in their attempts to sneak onto the grounds and steal a shot of the commander.

So far the reporters had been kept at bay. One person neither Suguri nor anyone else had been quite so successful with was Klaus.

Klaus, who had remained by Taki’s bedside the entire time, until called away on a message he simply couldn’t refuse.

And that moment, of all moments, was when Taki chose to wake up.

He lifted his head. Carefully, methodically, he tested each part of his body for pain. It felt lighter. It was there, but it was localised. And Taki was far less bogged down by it. On top of all that his vision was clear; free of the morphine haze for the first time in days.

The nightmare of his captivity lingered somewhere. It was like a solid, round weight that anchored him physically. Memories of Hans would spring from around the corner that day and in the months to come, sometimes with no warning.

And yet, that day, he awoke in merry sunlight that hinted at spring, with Suguri’s lined, familiar face watching with concern, and he sent a wordless thanks to the gods. He hoped his uncle was now among them, he realised suddenly, again trying to push the grief away for the time being.

Only one thing missing, Taki thought. He settled weakly back on the pillow and tried to shelve the childish thought.

Suguri had hoped that Taki would be comforted when he woke in familiar surroundings, but all he picked up was that strange anxiety.

‘He was here the whole time, Taki-sama,’ he explained awkwardly, remembering how annoying it had been to have a giant of a man sitting in his relatively small office and managing to consistently get in the way for over five hours. ‘He just left to –’

At that moment, there was a scuffle outside. Taki turned his head, ears straining.

‘Suguri!’ Klaus called, and, unaccountably, Taki's heart soared. ‘For fuck’s sake, I get why we need all the security but if you don't call these guard dogs off me...’

Suguri sighed, wondering if Wolfstadt had any right to call anyone else a guard dog. Before he even went to the door, Klaus managed to burst through anyway, the soldiers outside still calling after him.

His eyes landed on Taki and his face froze in shock to see him finally awake.

Taki gingerly lifted himself and raised his hand almost without thinking. In two strides, Klaus crossed to him, took his hand and kissed him. 

Suguri immediately turned away with an irritated sigh, feeling a flush creep up on his face.

When Klaus pulled back, it was only so he could look at Taki again and then kiss him a second time. And a third. Perhaps it was the effects of the medication, or the impossible, volatile emotional lurches he’d had to withstand over the past few days, or simply the juvenile insistence of Klaus’ embraces themselves, but Taki was shocked to find he was almost on the verge of laughing. He didn't.

‘How're you doing?’ Klaus asked, his gaze suddenly piercing.

With his forehead pressed against Klaus', Taki could only nod. 

As if he didn't believe him, Klaus turned to Suguri.

‘How's he doing?’

‘He’s better,’ said Suguri testily, who was facing them again and hoping his expression conveyed thorough disapproval.

Klaus turned back to Taki, whose desire to laugh had suddenly evaporated. He vividly recalled the number of times he lay on a thin mattress in a tiny, wood-panelled room and dreamed of Klaus. How powerfully he’d loathed himself for having taken it all for granted; the golden eyes and thick, calloused hands and easy grin. Having him here now was almost too much.

‘Sorry I wasn’t here,’ Klaus said, reaching over with his free hand to drag a chair to Taki’s bedside. ‘I asked them to tell me when Uemura might need my help for… for whatever, really. A cadet told me they saw him trying to move some projector equipment from room to room, so I did it for him.’

And just like that Taki felt like laughing again. He very nearly smiled at the image of Klaus taking projectors and pointers out of an annoyed Uemura’s hands and leading the way.

‘He’s doing okay,’ Klaus continued, guilt and relief mixed on his face in a single swathe. ‘Good guy. Doesn’t seem to care too much that I nearly killed him. It’ll take a lot of errands to make it up to him, though.’

He hadn’t once let go of Taki’s hand. He let his gaze roam over Taki’s pale cheeks and narrow jawline. The blue-black shine of his hair, which had begun to reclaim some of its lustre. The polished-rock shine of his eyes which were nevertheless half-lidded, either with fatigue or in contemplation Klaus couldn’t be sure.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked again.

Taki nodded. He glanced up at Suguri.

‘I don’t want to put you out any longer than I need to,’ he said, relieved to hear his voice had almost returned to normal. ‘I feel well enough to return to my room, at least.’

Suguri refused at once. He cited the need to run more tests and strongly suggested that it would be better if Taki remained where he could monitor him closely, at least for the rest of the day.

He looked pointedly at Klaus, hoping the hint was clear enough. Klaus, however, sat low in the chair by the bed, legs splayed casually in front of him. The only point of tension on his body was the hand that still held Taki's down on the bedspread.

‘Well, I'm just going to have to make myself comfortable in your office for a few more hours, Doc.’

Taki said nothing and made no move to reclaim his hand from beneath Klaus'.

Suguri was unexpectedly reminded of the day he held a gun to Klaus’ head in that exact same place.

He sighed and gave in, wondering if he was good at doing much else anymore.

And though he would never admit it, he was also reticently happy at the awkward but unmistakeably pleased look in Taki's eyes. Perhaps, Suguri ventured, and not for the first time, it would be good for him too.

* * *

At some point over the course of that day, Suguri returned to see Klaus lying sideways across Taki's lap, his feet propped up on the windowsill.

He made another noise of frustration.

‘Would you at least take your shoes off?’

This was greeted with a carefree chuckle.

‘Too comfortable to move right now, Doc.’

Taki, his heart light, listened quietly to their squabble for the next few minutes. 

Neither could be sure what it was. Perhaps they were still reeling from the aftermath of what Taki had said to him, through tears, on Klaus' bike as they sheltered from a blizzard. Perhaps it was the weight of the past few days and months. Perhaps it was simply a moment – a day – that required the pain and misunderstandings and mistakes of years in order for them to have truly deserved it. Whatever the case, the day they spent in that small office unexpectedly turned into a rare, precious one for them both. One whose transcience and implausibility almost didn't matter.

Taki knew he would have to confront everything sooner or later. The unimaginable pain of the past few days. All the mistakes he made before then.

In fact, before they implicitly agreed that they would unite in their effort to ward off the real world, at least for now, they forayed once or twice into places that opened wounds. Some new, some old.

This had happened earlier, when Klaus was still sitting by the bedside and Suguri had left to gather supplies at the infirmary.

Klaus had watched Taki shift and wince slightly. It was a world away from the state Taki had been in when he clung to Klaus on the motorbike, zooming through No Man’s Land, and yet Klaus felt the stirrings of the same helplessness.

‘What can I do?’ he asked.

Taki stared at his hand as he slid a little lower onto the pillows.

‘Nothing,’ he replied, his voice quiet. ‘Just... don't go.’

Klaus’ heart skipped a beat.

‘Not a chance in hell. I'm done going away. I won't even if you order me to. Not that you technically can order me anymore.’

Immediately after he spoke, Klaus wondered what in God’s name had compelled him to say those words. He attributed it to a thoughtless attempt to make light of the situation and lift Taki's spirits.

_You’re a goddamn moron, Wolfstadt._

He kicked himself even more at the look it brought about on Taki's face. At how Taki tried to sit up again.

'No, hey, sorry. I didn't mean that. It was a stupid joke -'

Taki, almost in a whisper, said, ‘I should never have done that.’

A small pause.

Klaus stared straight down, unsure if he was feeling the hollows of the gong again or simply the memory of it. He suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye.

'I didn't make it easy for you. Leaving you. Uemura... And everything before that, even. You know, I –’

Another pause, of a slightly different kind.

‘Everything you said was true,’ he finished. ‘That's what got to me most.’

Taki took a deep breath, wondering whether he knew how to begin.

‘You don't understand. That's – I had to say all that. But really, it's because I thought being sent from me was... was what you wanted.’

Klaus was struck dumb. That was not at all what he was expecting.

‘What I wanted? Why would you –?'

He then remembered everything he'd said to Taki during their fight. His guilt ran rampant again.

‘I was angry then. And really fucking jealous. I never once wanted to leave you. I'm sorry I made you think –’

‘That's not it either.’

Klaus stared, again at a loss. ‘Then why?’

Taki swallowed and looked away.

‘Hans…’

The name sparked something overwhelming in both of them. Klaus almost caved to his instinct to refuse to talk about him. To steamroll over his very existence.

Instead, he listened.

And, in no time at all, he forgot what was real and what wasn’t.

* * *

Like Taki, it would take a while for Klaus to accept it, let alone process what it meant. And unlike Taki, Klaus had a past with Hans to contemplate. There were things that suddenly made more sense and other things less sense still.

He thought about a body lying on the mountainside in No Man’s Land.

It was all impossible to reconcile. Or it seemed that way, for the moment.

And so Klaus chose not to try. That was a problem for the world outside, he decided. The world of reporters and politicians and commanders and captains and questions.

Before he came to that decision, there was a moment where the truth about Hans reminded him of something. Something he’d been thinking about for days.

_I heard you, Taki. When you were in that basement. Like I heard your voice in my head. I can’t explain it. So I don't know anymore. I don't know what this land of yours and these gods of yours are capable of._

He was close to voicing it, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to be responsible for bringing the image of that ancient cellar to Taki’s mind as he lay in those sunlit sheets.

He wouldn’t let anything invade their four walls now. Not when he had Taki in a way he’d only previously dreamed about.

* * *

Aside from Klaus, Suguri only allowed a handful of people past the guards outside.

One of them, by the grace of his rank, was Hasebe. His relief at having the commander back was so potent that he was willing to overlook Wolfstadt’s presence.

After trying stiffly to convey his emotions, Hasebe almost gratefully reverted to matters of administration. He informed Taki that Tachibana-sama, who had stepped in as commander over the past few days, had returned to the capital.

It had the tinny, warning ring of reality to it. Both Taki and Klaus heard it and stiffened.

_Not yet._

Taki dismissed him as soon as he could without being rude. Hasebe also mentioned, before he was ushered out, that he and the other staff members believed it in everyone’s best interest for Taki to prove to the country that he was alive and well. He suggested a nationwide broadcast, whenever Taki-sama was feeling up to it.

Sensing that it would send him from the office, Taki tiredly sorted out the details with him. In a week. At the Reizen residence. Full coverage.

A national television broadcast, Klaus observed with a small smile. And yet from Taki’s casual, resigned tone, he could have been arranging a tea ceremony.

Hasebe finally left and even Suguri felt the sense of peace that reclaimed the room in his wake.

* * *

He still hadn’t let go of Taki’s hand. Instead, he’d experimented with it, mostly subconsciously. He ran his thumb over Taki’s fingernails. Gently massaged his knuckles. Laced their fingers together. Flipped it so Taki’s hand was palm up. Dragged his fingers through the creases.

The whole time, while Taki’s face didn’t give anything away, it felt as though each touch brought something new to life inside him. And all Klaus did as he inspired such grandiosity was sit by his bed, legs stretched before him, his other hand in his pocket. Eyes on Taki most of the time but, sometimes, when he spoke, eyes off in the distance.

He knows now, Taki thought. He knows about Hans. He knows why I did what I did. Does he really forgive me? Is it possible to forgive something like that?

Klaus picked up on it and his eyes honed in on Taki’s.

And then, for a terrifying moment, Taki was back in the room that smelled like earth. Where every single one of his thoughts had been picked up and responded to. Where he was trapped in every way he could think of and only thoughts of Klaus had kept him going.

He tried to calm his pulse. To feel his way back into the room.

Klaus sat up slightly.

‘What’s wrong?’

A tangle of things that he couldn’t possibly undo in one day.

But one thing, perhaps, that he could. His heart suddenly pounded.

‘Klaus,’ he began, the knuckles of his other hand white, his eyes again on the bedspread. ‘I know the war is over. And you're free now to return to your own country.’

Klaus was about to interrupt but he didn't. He didn't need Hans' power to know that Taki was working up to something.

‘So I understand if you refuse. Especially given everything I've –’

Klaus waited, breath held.

The last time, he had been the one to ask Taki, Klaus suddenly realised. So, this time –

‘Would... would you ever consider –’ His voice lost all of its power. 'Being my knight again?’

_Being mine again?_

He didn’t meet Klaus' eye as he spoke, but after he finished, he looked up. His dark eyes, like his voice, were filled with a simple, poignant nervousness that made Klaus’ heart ache.

He picked up the hand he hadn’t yet released and kissed the back of it. Then he kissed his fingertips.

‘You can send me from your side as many times as you want,’ he said. ‘And every time you ask for me back, I'll say yes. Every time.’

There was a silence in which Taki found himself wondering what the colour would have been, the one inside him then, as Hans might have seen it.

‘Don't test me on that, though,' Klaus added.

A thought occurred to Taki. The broadcast the following week. Klaus was barely fazed. Where and how didn't matter.

‘But I did always suspect I had a face for television.’

Again, a smile that lit Taki up from within, even if he didn’t show it.

‘Can I sit next to you?’ Klaus asked suddenly.

The last time he asked that, after they returned from the laburnums, wet from rain, he was nervous as hell. Now he wore a smile that somehow managed to cover everything that had taken place in the year that had passed.

Taki's response, on the other hand, was almost identical. Staring at his lap, he gave one curt nod.

Klaus slid onto the bed beside him, on top of the blanket, boots crossed, arm hooked around Taki's waist. He pulled him against his chest and shoulder. He smelled Taki’s hair at his leisure. Kissed it.

The sun had climbed the sky and steadily gave off more heat. Klaus felt Taki’s body getting heavier.

‘You should sleep,' he said. 'I'll be here. Unless Uemura needs his laundry done.'

Taki’s hand was curled in on itself with Klaus’ palm and fingers curving around it. Taki stared at their hands as he drifted off. His last thought took the form of a strange, anxious hope that he would wake up there again and nowhere else.

* * *

One of the people who made it through Suguri’s stringent screening was a cadet.

Haruki Yamamoto arrived later in the afternoon, when Klaus’ head was in Taki’s lap and his boots, to Suguri’s perpetual annoyance, still on the windowsill.

When Suguri reported the name of the cadet, Taki immediately told him to let him through. Suguri looked at Klaus, who was still prone on Taki's lap.

‘It's okay, the kid's on board,’ he said carelessly.

After a brief nod from Taki, Suguri opened the door to let him in. 

‘Hey, kid,’ said Klaus, flashing him an upside-down grin.

Haruki took in the scene and blushed instantly.

‘I apologise for having interrupted your studies, Cadet Yamamoto,’ said Taki gently.

‘Not at all, Taki-sama,’ Haruki stammered.

‘I called you here, Haruki, to try to convey something important. But there’s nothing I can say that could ever express my gratitude for what you did.’

The evenness of his tone managed to carry a level of sincerity that floored the cadet. It had the inverse effect of making Haruki feel humble and grateful just for hearing the commander speak like that.

‘It – it was nothing, sir,’ he said and kicked himself immediately for what was possibly the worst choice of words.

Klaus chuckled.

‘Seriously, kid,’ he said. ‘With that amount of courage and insubordination, you’re another me in the making.’

Haruki let out a short, quiet laugh. He wondered, again, why the words brushed a place in him that felt almost hollow.

Taki then informed him he would be awarded the highest medal for cadets at a public ceremony the following week, along with a general service medal for actions that went above and beyond the call of duty.

His eyes’ll fall out of his head if they get any wider, Klaus thought fondly.

After bowing entirely too many times, Haruki turned to leave before he remembered. He drew something out of his pocket and approached the bed.

‘I wanted to return your gun, Klaus-sama,’ he said nervously. ‘Thank you for letting me keep it for so long. Now that I’ve… I’ve used it, I feel like I should give it back.’

He remembered how redly the blood had seeped over the snow. Klaus saw a brief flash of it across his face. It occurred to him then that he and Taki weren’t alone in trying to keep the past at bay.

He finally took his feet off the windowsill and rolled over. He pulled himself carefully over Taki’s legs to sit before Haruki on the edge of the bed.

‘I said I'd thank you properly when this was all over, didn't I?’ he said. 'What if I let you keep the gun for good?’

Haruki’s mouth fell open. ‘No, Klaus-sama, I couldn’t –’

‘It’s really not that big a deal,’ said Klaus gently. ‘You’ve earned it. It’s yours by right, now. Okay?’

Again, that strange feeling. Something verging on unpleasant. Haruki closed his lips tightly and tried to identify it. He couldn’t.

He tried to hold Klaus’ gaze as he thanked him.

He suspected at that moment, and he turned out to be right, that the gun would end up being his most treasured possession, even more than the medals that Taki-sama was to bestow on him in view of the entire country.

* * *

‘Move aside,’ Suguri said briskly.

‘What for?’

‘I need to take a blood sample.’

And so Klaus let go of Taki’s hand for the first time.

He watched the blood collect richly in the vial. Taki had stared at it too before he had to turn away. Colours, he thought. Especially vivid ones. They would take a while to overcome.

And then when Klaus took his chin in his hand, turned his head and kissed him again, he sank back into a place where colours, for now, were just colours.

* * *

The final three who were allowed in were, of course, Azusa, Date and Moriya.

Before they were admitted, to spare Taki even the minor stress of having to ask, Klaus let go of his hand and stepped away.

They entered carrying auras each as different as they were. Moriya’s was stiff, awkward happiness and Azusa’s was open warmth. Date, meanwhile, was beetroot red and refused to look anyone in the eye.

After Taki thanked them in a tone that wavered once or twice, Azusa pressed his hand and kissed it. Moriya did the same. They all struggled to contain the weight of the past few days against the backdrop of decades.

Date approached in a manner that suggested his joints needed to be oiled. After a tense few moments where Taki tried and failed to catch his gaze, Date, with no warning, flung his arms around Taki and buried his head in his shoulder.

Klaus’ eyebrows shot up his forehead. Moriya looked like he wanted to disappear into the ground.

Suguri watched helplessly as Date sobbed, Klaus laughed and a wide-eyed Taki tried to return the hug. Azusa apologetically pulled Date off him, explaining that they hadn’t had much sleep recently and that some of them needed it more than others.

* * *

An implausible bubble to be sure. One that didn't permit them to think about things, heavy things, that they hadn't even begun to tackle. A moment that was fragile and fleeting. But one they all needed.

One in which Klaus memorised the look on Taki’s face when Date fell on him.

And one in which Taki privately savoured the sound of Klaus’ laugh. It was a laugh that had always sounded golden to him – a colour he had always seen – even before the arrival of Hans Regenwalde.


	19. The Youngest Emperor in a Thousand Years

Over the next week, spring peeked out intermittently from behind the cold cape of winter. The sun would emerge for days at a time and gently thaw the remaining patches of snow. Other days, it was like they were in the thick of winter again and the wind would howl against every window in the compound.

It was a day in between that found Klaus smoking a cigarette outside Taki’s building. Brief gusts of wind flipped his coat collar up against his face and sent bright little embers trailing off into space. He could barely tell whether it was afternoon or evening.

He only ever left Taki’s bedroom when Taki was resting. And even then, he would wait to make sure Taki was deeply asleep rather than in a semi-passed-out state due to his injuries, which would find him waking at odd intervals. And even then, Klaus would leave not because he wanted to but because Taki made him promise he would stretch his legs every once in a while and have some time to himself.

Klaus, for his part, somewhat dreaded his time alone. His thoughts almost always strayed to Hans.

Various shades of Hans.

The first was not so much a shade as a creature. The monster in his gut that had once rained scales and breathed fire. It was now, finally, dead.

The shade that followed immediately on the heels of that cold, dead creature was, of course, guilt. Not for what he did to Hans on the mountainside but for everything else. Things dating as far back as riverbanks at night. Dorm rooms and dusty football fields. Things that had fuelled the monster without his even being fully aware of it.

And then occasionally, amazingly, there was still the jealousy. Though now, it wasn’t quite like it was before. This was in a place that was harder to reach.

He no longer imagined Hans fucking Taki. Instead he imagined their final two months together. How much Hans got to see. How much of Taki he understood. If what Taki explained about Hans’ gift was accurate, he would have seen through to the deepest parts of Taki in a way Klaus was still lurching and blundering about trying to find.

He now angrily fought the realisation that, if circumstances were different, Taki would have been far better off with Hans. In almost every way.

 _Klaus_ , Taki had said to him when they came across the broken jeep. _Please don’t._

He took a deep drag.

Taki’s distance. His huge, thorny barrier against the world. The various shackles on him put there by his country and duty. It all needed someone like Hans, not Klaus, to break through. It needed omniscience. A gentle touch.

_Not whatever the hell I am._

The main door of the building eased open and Taki stepped outside, wearing his jade coat. Klaus looked round in surprise.

‘Hey,’ he said, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. ‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

Klaus looked carefully but he did in fact seem alright, if a little drowsy.

‘It's too cold out here. You should go back inside.’

‘I've been in there for long enough.’

It had been nearly a week, after all, Klaus thought. The bubble had long since burst and they had already inched back into the real world. The world of commanders and captains, politicians and journalists.

The door swung closed behind Taki as he stepped out. Klaus watched his hair get caught in a fresh gust of wind. He raised a gloved hand to it carefully. Klaus noticed he’d pulled his army coat over the thick, woollen clothes he’d worn in bed.

Keeping up appearances in case his men should see him, Klaus guessed with a fond curve of his lips. Always thinking of morale. Honour and image.

‘Up for a walk?’ he asked, grinding the cigarette underfoot.

Taki nodded, relieved that Klaus wasn’t going to try to usher him back inside.

They headed down the steps slowly and across the grounds. Keeping his usual distance, a few paces behind and to the left, Klaus kept a close eye on him. He seemed to be moving without too much trouble. He remembered how freely the blood had gushed from the bullet wound above Taki's hip when Klaus found him. How Klaus' hands shook while he wrapped his old bandages around Taki, hoping it would be enough.

_The reason I wanted you to come with me. Why I made you my knight._

Klaus’ eyes darted again to the back of Taki’s head.

_I couldn’t bear the thought of not being with you._

The words still managed to find him whenever he stumbled into self-pity and doubt. Their simplicity countered even the complex shades of Hans.

_I still wanted you near me._

Over the first day or so, Klaus wasn’t sure what was harder to face; his own staggering ignorance of the depth of Taki’s feelings, or the possibility that Taki hadn’t actually meant any of it.

But it became clear in slow bursts that he was wrong on the second count. First in Suguri’s office where Taki was palpably anxious when he wasn’t near him, and then when Taki moved to his own bedroom and drifted off to sleep in Klaus’ arms at all hours of the day and night. Leaned his face into Klaus’ hand. Returned his kisses.

And there was the final shade of Hans – the most complex of all. Gratitude. For bringing it out of Taki. After a full year where no amount of earth-shattering dramas or near-death experiences had come close, Hans Regenwalde had finally set that free.

If only for now, a small voice reminded Klaus.

They reached the trees of the courtyard, which were still bare and shivering with the memory of winter. It seemed hard to believe they would be full to bursting with green leaves in only a few weeks’ time.

Klaus tried to ignore that small voice in his head. It was the same one that reminded him he was no match for Hans where it counted. The same one that reminded him of how he’d attacked Taki with the question of his own knighthood. _That’s a fucking good point. Why_ am _I your knight, Taki?_

And his own awful reply. _If all you wanted was someone to help you win the war, you have him now._

Sure, he had been angry at the time. Fighting and losing against the scaly, fire-breathing creature. But how callous and unthinking his words seemed now, in hindsight, in comparison to Taki's quiet desire for him. His quiet love.

_Love._

Taki chose that moment to pause beneath the trees. He pulled his coat around him tighter and blew into his gloves. Hands in his pockets, Klaus found himself staring at his shoes.

_Love?_

Despite knowing that there shouldn’t be even the smallest room for doubt, there he was again, angrily wishing he had Hans' power.

When he next looked up, Taki’s eyes were on him.

‘Are you okay?’

A flicker of warmth. A memory of the night that Taki had stayed up for hours and held his unconscious body, sharing the blood smears from Klaus' bandages. He wondered at the small chance that Taki had been trying to show it, in his own way, all that time.

‘I’m supposed to ask you that,’ Klaus replied with a small smile.

Though relieved to see him smile, Taki wondered what Klaus had been thinking about that had suddenly made him look so melancholy. It wasn’t a look he was used to.

Taki noted how his eyes simmered like a small flame in that chill afternoon. A frame that seemed a great deal sturdier than the bare trees around them. Hair that was somehow both soft and coarse, he recalled.

He had gotten so used to the warmth and comfort of Klaus’ body over the past week that he very nearly caved to the urge to be close to him again – there in broad daylight.

He was glad he didn’t, for at that moment a sergeant turned the corner, followed by three privates. They caught sight of the commander and their heels clicked together instantly. Taki returned the salute and told them to remain at ease.

There was a brief pause. All four pairs of eyes were still on him. Klaus at first thought he recognised that look of awe and adoration. But this was just a touch different.

‘Taki-sama,’ the sergeant said, and Taki and Klaus were equally shocked to see his eyes swimming with tears.

And suddenly one of the privates was kneeling on the ground by Taki’s feet. He took Taki’s hand and kissed it. The other two privates took their caps off and approached, looking almost as overwhelmed. The sergeant just stood there, tears still threatening to pour.

‘Taki-sama,’ the most articulate of the privates managed to say, cap in hand. ‘We’re… we’re so happy you’re alive.’

He dropped his gaze to the floor.

Klaus’ heart warmed at the little scene. _We’ve seen it with our own eyes,_ Suguri once said. _We need a pillar of strength. A god in the form of a man._

Taki recovered quickly. He placed his hand gently on the shoulder of the private who had kneeled and told him to rise.

‘I'm grateful to be back,’ he said, and everyone there heard the sincerity of his tone. ‘And proud to know that I returned to such dedicated soldiers.’

While the men took the time to absorb his words, the sergeant suddenly snapped his gaze up at Klaus as though seeing him for the first time.

‘Attention!’ he barked at his men. ‘Officer present!’

The other soldiers faced Klaus. Just like they did for Taki, they brought their heels together and hands flew to their foreheads, firm and precise.

Klaus blinked in surprise.

‘Captain,’ the sergeant said stiffly, his tears suddenly gone. ‘On behalf of the Fifteenth Armoured Division, we would like to thank you for bringing our commander home safely.’

Klaus, hands still in his pockets, was gobsmacked for a few moments.

A silence unlike any of its kind took over the small courtyard.

Klaus might well have remained there, or worse, made some kind of stupid joke, had Taki not turned to him then, his eyes warm. He returned the salute and found he was, briefly, at a loss for words. He managed to say, ‘As you were, soldier’ and was almost relieved when the sergeant and privates filed past.

The stupid joke came a second or two later.

‘Well, that was easy,’ he said. ‘All I had to do was run to No Man’s Land and blow up a farmhouse.’

Taki watched him for a few seconds. Klaus was staring after the soldiers with a pleased, still somewhat dazed expression, his hand on the back of his head.

Again, Taki had to fight back another wave of desire. They had started to sneak up on him over the past day or so; when the pain slowly receded into the background and he was suddenly, inexplicably, aware of the size and strength of the body lying still beside him. Like it was dormant, Taki had thought at the time. Like he suddenly, inexplicably, wanted to know what would happen if he woke it.

‘Let’s go back to the room,’ he said, his voice quiet.

Klaus looked at him with concern again.

‘Are you tired?’

‘No.’

The answer took a while to sink in. In fact, Taki had to take a few steps away before it did. It could have meant a great many things, Klaus knew.

And yet, when he followed, he did so feeling like a lot like a teenager escaping to the river in the middle of the night.

* * *

_A WEEK EARLIER_

From his bed in Suguri's office, despite all their efforts to keep reality at bay, Taki in a low voice told Klaus about what Hans told him. About Mussolin. About the network of spies working for him. Eurote's plans.

That night, after Taki fell asleep, Klaus immediately walked across the grounds and knocked on Hasebe’s door.

Having never been in a room together alone, the few minutes that followed were quite unpleasant for them both.

He has such a square head, Klaus thought out of nowhere.

‘Mussolin’s the guy,’ he said simply. ‘Taki just told me.’

He asked Hasebe to find out what he could but to keep it from Taki while he was recovering.

After getting over his initial shock, a tight-lipped Hasebe nodded curtly. He surmised that a quick phone call to headquarters would get the ball rolling. The final stop would be the League of Nations, which, hopefully, would investigate and bring the bastard down.

Klaus was struck by the lack of questions or preamble or doubt. Say what you want about the man, he thought. His love for his country, and Taki especially, was rock solid.

Just as Klaus turned to leave, he smiled over his shoulder.

‘You know, I've always secretly liked you,’ he said flippantly. ‘Even if you did try to get Azusa to kill me that one time. Bet now you're glad that plan failed, huh?’

Seeing Hasebe’s face take on a shade of red so deep was one of the highlights of Klaus’ week.

* * *

It was believed by Suguri and a few others that Taki might not be able to cope with returning to his bedroom. It was the site, after all, where he had been shot, bled nearly to death and then abducted. Despite the carpet being replaced and the entire room having been scrubbed until it gleamed, Hasebe told him that a room on another floor had been made available.

Taki quietly told everyone he would be fine.

Klaus went with him. He watched as Taki stood in the middle of his room, leaning on the cane that Suguri had insisted that he use for the next few days.

Though he’d heard some of the grisly details from Suguri, Klaus found himself wondering again exactly what had happened there. A part of him knew he wasn't ready to hear the answer. That it would make him want to drag Hans back from the dead just to kill him all over again.

And then Taki turned to him.

‘I'm fine,’ he said. ‘You don't have to stay.’

‘I want to.’

 _Unless you want me to go?_ he suddenly wondered, trying to read the answer on his face.

That was the first time Klaus found himself jealous of Hans in that new, insidious way. Hans would know immediately what Taki meant.

‘I’m going to take a shower,’ Taki said, almost to himself. He sounded tired.

_Do you want me to join you?_

At that, Klaus nearly smiled at himself. No need for god-given telepathy to know the answer there.

‘I'll be waiting.’

* * *

_IN THE EUROTEAN CAPITAL_

At that moment, Chancellor Adar Mussolin was also waiting. He sat behind his desk, the lower half of his face hidden behind clasped hands.

That morning, when he entered his office, he cast a scathing glance over the large sepia-toned map of the world he’d framed and mounted behind his desk. It was simple symbolism, he had thought when he watched it being mounted. So anyone who came into his office would see him at the forefront of the world.

How stupid that decision seemed now. How ridiculous that a single commander of a single division could make the entire frame seem laughable.

He wasn’t in danger yet, he knew. In fact, he’d done everything right once he heard that Reizen had returned alive. He flew to the press with grave, sincere well-wishes and gratitude that such an inimitable friend and ally (at that point he’d nearly frowned; had he already used those words previously?) was safe and sound.

The world still blamed the west. Western officers, or so the rumour went, were responsible for each assassination, and Taki Reizen’s abduction. That was truth, after all, Mussolin told himself. It would take quite a bit of dedicated snooping before anything led back to him.

And yet his pulse skyrocketed when his phone rang. It was the secure line.

‘What happened?’

Tachibana’s accent was the only thing that gave him away. The man’s Eurotean was perfect, Mussolin thought again with begrudging respect.

‘I have no fucking clue,’ he said, almost hearing Tachibana wince at his choice of words. He was past caring about propriety. ‘One of my men disobeyed orders and didn’t kill Reizen. And I have no idea how he was found. The safe house was in No Man’s Land, for God’s sake.’

A small pause.

‘We might get out of this yet,’ said Mussolin.

 _I might_ , Tachibana thought. _But your time is up._

‘And there’s every chance your uncle can hold onto the position of emperor,’ Mussolin continued. ‘After all, there’s no one else to –’

‘Reizen is alive,’ Tachibana said simply. ‘He’s the only male Reizen left. He’s next in line.’

Mussolin’s face screwed up in confusion.

‘But he’s only twenty! That would make him –’

‘The youngest emperor in a thousand years or so,’ said Tachibana tensely, as though blaming Mussolin for this fact. ‘Yes, it would.’

Mussolin was about to reply with more bafflement but he refrained. That country’s archaic customs had always been beyond him. If they wanted a stripling as an emperor, it would probably happen.

‘I called to let you know we’re ending all communication with Eurote,’ Tachibana said, his tone abrupt and formal. ‘We plan to stay by the side of the throne at least, even if the Reizens keep it.’ Another pause. ‘If things go bad for you, we’ll claim we had no idea about any of it.’

 _You’re throwing me under the bus, in other words,_ Mussolin thought angrily. His loathing of that small country reached new heights.

‘Tachibana –’

‘Forgive me for presuming to give you advice,’ said Tachibana crisply before hanging up. ‘But you should pick your men with more care next time.’

And so, after the phone was replaced, Adar Mussolin went back to clasping his hands before his face with the framed world at his back.

* * *

The day after he moved from Suguri’s office to his own room, the real world in the form of officers and journalists and even a politician or two tried to sneak past Klaus.

At first, Klaus kept them away. Politics didn't matter nearly as much as Taki's recovery. Of course Mussolin was dangerous and powerful. But, short of sending someone to Taki’s room to kill him, he couldn’t do much from Eurote. And Klaus would be there to lunge at the throat of anyone who tried.

Besides Taki’s recovery, there was another reason Klaus wanted to keep the politics at bay. Something had been niggling in the back of his mind, leaving little crumbs. An easy enough trail to follow.

The last remaining Reizen. 

He didn’t know how to feel about his suspicion that Taki was next in line for the throne.

His immediate reaction had been happiness and pride. It was only too easy to imagine Taki as the nation’s youngest and most beloved emperor in God knows how long. He, Klaus, would be proud to serve in his shadow. To serve as the emperor’s knight. To be the wall between Taki and anyone who might want to hurt him.

He even allowed other parts of him to regale in the thought. Sneaking into some large four-poster in a huge chamber. Searching out Taki’s body beneath those layered robes. Fucking the nation’s youngest and most beloved emperor. Seeing a side of him that the doting nation would never see.

But he knew it wouldn’t nearly be so simple. His struggles over the past year at the Fifteenth Armoured Division would pale in comparison to those he would face in the Imperial Palace.

The distance between them would grow even more. And just when he thought they were starting to find each other again.

These were the thoughts going through his mind as he stood by the window in the hallway outside Taki’s room, watching a small hawk take flight across the grounds. Then, when he turned, the regally dressed Taki in his mind seemed to float towards him around the corner. He blinked.

It wasn’t Taki. In fact, he didn’t look anything like Taki beyond the clothes Klaus had just envisioned. He appeared to be somewhere in his thirties, with an elegant face, a flawless, alabaster complexion and mellow eyes.* Robes of amethyst and silver. Several attendants followed, along with a stiff, upright Hasebe.

Though taken aback by the sight, Klaus took a few slow steps that planted him in front of Taki’s door.

‘His Grace, Meiji-sama, is here to pay his respects to Taki-sama,’ Hasebe said. ‘Move aside.’

‘Taki’s sleeping,’ Klaus said simply.

He found he was unable to take his eyes off the one called Meiji, whose refined beauty was rather striking up close. His hair was piled delicately atop his head and held in place by intricate wooden pins. There was a benign smile playing around his lips as he took in the tall foreigner barring his way. Klaus guessed he was from one of the eight noble branches.

‘We’ll have to wake him, then,’ said Hasebe. ‘Meiji-sama travelled here from the other side of the country just to see him.’

‘Taki’s sleeping,’ Klaus repeated firmly, turning to Hasebe.

‘Wolfstadt –’

‘It’s alright, Grand Chamberlain,’ said Meiji, and Klaus was instantly captivated by his voice. It reminded him of honey. Or silk. Something smooth and hypnotic. ‘Please don’t disturb Taki-sama on my account. I’m happy to wait.’

‘Thank you,’ said Klaus with a small, grateful smile.

Hasebe blustered at Klaus’ appalling lack of honorifics.

‘You – I do apologise, Meiji-sama! Wolfstadt!’ he hissed. ‘Address His Holiness in the proper manner –’

Meiji gave a quiet but lively laugh.

‘I’ll be waiting in my room, Grand Chamberlain,’ he said, turning to go. ‘I’ll rest easy knowing our Taki-sama is well-guarded.’ He threw Klaus a look that made him feel like he’d known him for years. ‘I hope to see you with Taki-sama when I return.’

‘You bet,’ Klaus replied easily, grinning both in reply to Meiji and at the look on Hasebe’s face.

After Meiji and his little procession left the hallway, Klaus turned the handle to the door and stepped inside. Taki lay perfectly still in bed. He went to the bed and sat on its edge. He rested his hand on Taki’s hair as he slept, unaware that Hans had done the same thing only days ago in a place miles from there.

When Taki awoke, Klaus told him about the visitor he turned away.

‘I’m surprised he came,’ said Taki, sitting up against the headboard. ‘He’s always been quiet when it comes to national affairs, which my uncle thought was a shame. He always thought Meiji-sama would make a good leader.’

Klaus heard how the line stretched into the future. One where Taki would take the throne and Klaus would watch him from afar.

So he moved closer to Taki on the bed and kissed his lips softly. He held the back of his head and tilted his face to deepen the kiss. Taki breathed him in. Hands on his chest. The one who had gone to the ends of the Earth to find him and bring him back.

‘I'll have to talk to them soon, Klaus,’ he said gently after Klaus pulled away. ‘And not just them. I'll have to figure out some way of convincing the world about what Mussolin did. You have to stop sending them away.’

A sheepish grin.

‘It’s only been a day,’ he complained good-naturedly.

_I want to keep you to myself for a little while longer. While I can._

* * *

They only spoke of Hans one final time.

‘Taki.’

He looked round at the tense note in Klaus’ voice. He was staring at a place on the carpet. Not far from where I would have fallen, Taki realised suddenly.

‘Did Hans –?’ Klaus struggled and swallowed. ‘Did he ever –?’

Grey eyes beneath a russet fringe. A look of concern. Regret and guilt.

‘No,’ Taki said softly, surprised at how easily he was able to talk about it. Somehow, he sensed that Klaus was hurting over it more than he was. ‘Not like that.’

And so he told Klaus everything, from passing out in the room to waking in No Man’s Land. Hans’ plan to escape Mussolin. Everything until Klaus found him in the cellar.

Silence followed.

‘I shouldn't have killed him.’

Taki looked at him nervously.

‘I should have kept him alive and dragged him back here and showed him what real pain is.’

Bizarrely enough, Klaus felt like he'd let his grandfather down. He remembered how, as a boy, he held the fresh, young rose in both hands, shocked and guilty, before burying his face in its petals and inhaling deeply. Old enough now to know better, not only had he plucked the rose, he hadn't been able to stop someone else from taking it out of his hands and grinding it underfoot. He'd done the equivalent of stand there and watch.

‘He felt real pain his whole life,’ said Taki suddenly, though his voice was still low.

Klaus' eyes flashed. Taki calmly held his gaze.

‘I'm not defending anything he did but... he suffered enough.’

_And I saw myself in him. And you._

Klaus looked away again. Various shades of Hans, he thought.

* * *

At Taki’s gentle insistence, Klaus finally let someone from the real world through. He was the first in a long line.

Of all people, it was Izumi Shunsuke, the media liaison with the long, nervous hands. He brought only a small tape recorder and a notepad and pen.

Klaus remembered how he’d picked up on Izumi’s glaringly obvious crush on the commander months ago. How the thought of them together had made him smile. Now, beyond a little flush in his cheeks at the knowledge of how privileged he was to have gotten past the bedroom door, Izumi immediately assumed an air of professionalism.

Only a day had passed since they left the bubble of Suguri’s office behind. Taki was still in too much pain to leave the bed for long stretches. And so Izumi sat by his bed and switched on the recorder.

Hasebe and Uemura were there as well. Suguri listened from nearby. Klaus watched like a hawk as the questions were asked and answered, prepared to call the whole thing off if Taki seemed like he wasn’t able to handle it.

But, like the war, like so much else that seemed impossible, the young commander saw it through to the end. He answered each question slowly and precisely. At times, he felt as though he was describing what had happened to someone else. Suguri listened with his teeth clenched, feeling something similar to Klaus.

When Taki outlined what Hans had told him about Mussolin, Izumi’s mouth set in a line and his shorthand recorded everything at the speed of light. In his mind, Izumi was already in his office, throwing the article together. _CHANCELLOR OF EUROTE IMPLICATED IN REIZEN ASSSASSINATIONS._ Mussolin might have armies and spies, Izumi thought. But I have words.

Hasebe and Uemura glanced at one another uneasily when they discovered that their commander had been in No Man’s Land. That his purity had been tainted and that the entire nation would soon come to know of it.

And yet, as they watched Taki calmly depicting a hellish few days they could only imagine, with a grace beyond his years, they suddenly couldn’t care less. And they suspected the nation might, gods willing, feel the same way.

* * *

_A WEEK LATER_

Taki didn’t say another word until they were back in his room. Klaus was still reeling both from being saluted by the soldiers in the courtyard and from what Taki had just said.

After letting Taki walk through the door first, Klaus followed and closed it behind them. Taki went to the middle of the room before he turned around. Then Klaus went to him and the kiss forced Taki to stumble backwards slightly. Klaus held him steady, taking care to avoid his left hip.

On the bed, Klaus used every drop of patience he had as he removed Taki’s clothes. He’d never been more careful. He was a little surprised to note Taki had lost weight, though it made sense given the circumstances. There was less muscle tone. He seemed just a touch more frail.

There was just one moment of hatred, mollified by the image of Hans lying dead, and Klaus was back.

He took Taki’s nipple in his mouth and flicked his tongue over the nib, feeling it harden. Hands gripped his hair. He moved his hand to Taki’s dick and was pleased to find it was already rock hard. He brushed a drop of pre-come off the tip.

Taki let out a low cry. His head was pressed back into the pillow.

‘What was it you said?’ Klaus asked, interspersing his words between biting and sucking Taki’s nipple and running his tongue over his chest. ‘You made me your knight... even though it meant... you couldn’t have me the way you wanted?’

His words took a second or two to absorb and then Taki blushed to his core.

Still fully clothed, Klaus pressed himself hard between Taki’s legs. He took Taki’s face in his hands.

‘Is this how you wanted me?’ he said through clenched teeth.

He didn’t give Taki a chance to respond. Taki struggled with both the weight of Klaus' body and his kiss. Klaus abruptly drew back and rose above him. He peeled off his shirt, his gaze still on Taki, still predatory. Then he unbuckled his belt.

‘I'm not your knight now,’ he said. ‘Not yet, anyway. You can have me in whatever way you want until tomorrow and your gods can’t do a damn thing about it.’

Tomorrow was when they would be bound for life again. And when all the vows that Taki had broken would solidify again.

When Klaus hovered above him, cock in hand and pressing against Taki’s hole, he glanced down at the gauze wrapped around Taki’s hip. At the cut on his arm. He took a few steady breaths and pushed.

Taki gasped and his nails dug into Klaus’ back. He felt his muscles straining and all the pain concentrated in the injury above his hip.

Klaus recognised the look that flashed across Taki’s face. He’d seen it once before, right before Taki passed out beneath him in his bed.

He pulled out immediately. 

 _No,_ was Taki's first visceral thought. _Don’t stop._

‘I’m sorry,’ Klaus said in an entirely different voice.

He almost lifted away completely, and Taki was about to let him, when he realised. He realised how much of the pain of the past few months and years owed simply to the fact that he didn't lend his voice to his thoughts. To what he really wanted.

If that was to be the final legacy of Hans Regenwalde, so be it.

‘Don’t stop,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘Please.’

Klaus was floored. Taki’s face was the picture of self-consciousness but the eyes that met his were steady.

Gently, disbelievingly, he bent low to kiss Taki’s lips and chin and neck. Then he tried again.

For Klaus, the anticipation and excruciating slowness almost overshadowed the pleasure. Almost. He stared down at Taki’s face, watched his eyes as he pushed into his body, and felt relief when his winces were gradually replaced by that familiar haze of pleasure. He began moving, trying his level best not to jolt Taki’s hips.

Taki heard Klaus' soft grunts of frustration. He understood how hard he was trying to hold back.

And so he tried to move. He lifted his hips to meet Klaus’ thrusts. The first time, it tore a loud moan from his throat. One of sheer pleasure and surprise.

Klaus heard it and responded. He moved faster and harder, alternating between holding Taki’s hands down above his head and letting him cling almost painfully to Klaus’ back.

What he really wanted was to spin Taki around and fuck him while watching his pre-come dripping down his back. To hear how the pillow muffled Taki’s cries. Instead, he raised Taki’s hips slightly off the bed and pounded.

Even with that slight shift in position, pain very quickly replaced pleasure. Taki cried out and tried to disguise it. By that stage, however, Klaus was long gone.

‘Shit,’ he gasped. ‘Oh, fuck! Taki, I’m coming.’

Taki was relieved to feel him come and reflected on the bizarre truth of his relief. Klaus lowered his hips to the bed and collapsed over him, bracing most of his weight on his forearms.

While Klaus lay still and fought for breath, Taki lifted his hand and ran his fingers over the back of Klaus's head, feeling the warm sweat that had gathered in his hair. For no reason, he was rushed by a feeling stronger than anything he’d ever felt before.

Klaus lifted his head and, for a moment,Taki wondered if he had somehow sensed it. But then Klaus looked down at their bodies.

‘You didn’t come.’

Taki blinked and tried to muster his thoughts. He had been in too much pain for that.

‘It’s okay.’

‘Like hell it is.’

And suddenly Klaus’ breath was on his cock, his tongue teasing the tip, and then his mouth lowered completely over Taki’s shaft right to the base. Taki arched his back and moaned his name.

As his climax built, so did the feeling he experienced earlier. He was submerged in it. Salt water that rushed him. Carried him wherever it went. He felt himself come into the warmth of Klaus’ mouth.

Klaus remained there for long moments. Then he finally raised his head and wiped his mouth.

‘It's been so long I almost forgot what you tasted like.’

He kissed the edge of the gauze near Taki’s hip, then his stomach, then he gathered him close again and kissed his mouth long and hard. Taki tasted himself on Klaus' tongue.

When Klaus looked at him, Taki saw that same feeling reflected in his eyes. The reciprocity of it suddenly left him breathless. 

And then he heard it murmured into his neck.

‘I love you.’

Taki was still coming down from his climax. His head was still full of Klaus and the strength of that feeling. He was still trying to catch his breath. It was all too much.

‘Klaus...’

For a few strained moments, Klaus waited.

And then he couldn’t bring himself to keep that look on Taki’s face any longer.

‘It's okay.'

_I know._

He put away the small shard of disappointment. He chose to let in the happiness instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *For any _Saezuru_ fans: kindly envision a dark-haired Yashiro as Meiji-sama. (I don’t know why I love Klaus/Yashiro so much that I keep throwing them together.)


	20. After the Ceremony, Under the Wisteria

Compared to the wildfire-like spread of news about Commander Taki Reizen's rise from the dead, the news about Mussolin took longer to catch.

It was met by the usual band of pundits and doubters. Skeptics both intelligent and not. Proponents both useful and not.

But, after a few flickering starts, it finally caught.

Izumi Shunsuke’s article was published nationwide. Then worldwide.

The League of Nations, which was formed after the first war and waited, with bated breath, for new hostilities to end, sent their own forces to Eurote to investigate the claims.

And, just like the Western Alliance before him, Mussolin discovered firsthand the importance of archaic customs like honour and image. After his treachery and deception was revealed, the tide turned against him almost overnight, both within his own country and from across the border – particular in the form of leaders of a jilted and seething West.

Tachibana and his family alone managed to avoid any scrutiny. Despite rampant speculation that Mussolin had to have worked with someone in the Eastern country, there simply wasn’t enough evidence.

Before long, Mussolin was forced to step down; a single step that took his political regime and threats of future wars down with him.

In the years to come, Klaus would congratulate himself for having singlehandedly prevented the spread of fascism.

* * *

Back in the compound, there was barely time to let the news sink in.

Strangely enough, in the way that things sometimes work out, it happened simultaneously. Around about the same time Chancellor Adar Mussolin went into hiding, cursing the day that he ever allowed Hans Regenwalde to take on the Fifteenth Armoured Division, Taki, Klaus and a small fellowship including Hasebe, Uemura, Azusa, Date, Moriya and even Haruki all boarded the motorcade bound for the Reizen property.

Cameras and teams of reporters followed.

* * *

It did the Reizen household no end of good to see the motorcade pull up. Though it wasn’t quite as grand as the procession that heralded the late emperor, simply knowing that a Reizen was returning home was enough to liven both the family and the staff.

Thick clouds covered the sun but, much like the Reizen daughters, it occasionally slipped away from its minders. Sunlight covered the lush grounds and wisteria trees in intermittent, blinding waves before being put away again.

Taki had barely stepped from the car when he was immediately set upon by three youngsters, who had grown a surprising amount in a little over a year.

Ear-to-ear grins and even a few tears marked their reunion. Taki crouched on the ground and embraced each in turn. _Lavender_ , he thought, before pushing the thought away.

Red-cheeked excitement turned into hushed veneration when the girls saw Klaus step out of the same car.

He stood uncertainly nearby, hands in his pockets again, wondering if they'd even remember him.

Three pairs of eyes widened.

_‘The guardian spirit! He's back!’_

And suddenly Klaus was engulfed by wide eyes and grasping hands. All four were suddenly transported to the day they each hid from their keepers; where they were fellow conspirators on the run. Laughing, Klaus bent down and swung the smallest and most insistent one up onto his shoulders – the one with eyes she could have stolen from her brother. She squealed with glee.

The last time they were there together, Taki hadn’t had the chance to see Klaus interact with his sisters. He watched for as long as he dared before he turned away, worried the feeling in his chest would overwhelm him.

* * *

Members from all eight of the noble branches had gathered to mark the occasion. And so it was relatively easy to call a quorum to discuss matters of leadership before the actual ceremony took place.

Klaus was surprised and pleased when Taki asked him to attend, although, truth be told, he had been anticipating a few hours to himself to hunt down a particular wisteria tree.

The east was full of contradictions, Klaus thought, finding himself in the middle of yet another one. The quorum was held in the large reception hall of the Reizen residence. Despite hosting all eight families, the room was mostly bare, save for tatami mats and demure watercolours on the walls. And yet, when the members dressed in their national robes began filing in and bowing low to one another before taking their seats, Klaus was struck at how the room was suddenly filled with all colours and shades, as well as glints of gold, silver and bronze in their headdresses and at their necks and wrists.

They don’t need any décor, he thought. They are the goddamn décor.

When Taki arrived, he was dressed in robes that Klaus had seen him wear only once before. Rich, deep maroon swathed him from top to bottom, offset by the glinting silver-blue headdress. Klaus’ heart skipped several beats when he saw him approach. Some things never change, he thought.

Klaus himself was back in his sky-blue robes. He felt himself drag along the ground heavily, the parachute-like sleeves billowing with every gust of wind.

How the blue fuck, he wondered, did Taki make it look so damn good?

In the Reizen reception hall, Klaus knelt on a cushion a little behind and to the left of Taki.

His insides gave a strange flip when he recognised Meiji’s half-lidded eyes and enigmatic lips from across the room.

He recalled how much he had enjoyed watching Meiji and Taki interact back at the compound. How relaxed Taki seemed to be in his presence. In that brief meeting, Klaus understood why Taki’s uncle might have taken him for a true leader. There was sanguine wisdom behind his ever-smiling face.

Not far from Meiji was the man he recognised from broadcasts as Tachibana; the one who had taken over the division in Taki's absence. The one whose uncle, Klaus remembered, was still technically serving as interim emperor.

And then Tachibana senior himself arrived. Weathered face, pointed moustache and shrewd eyes. He seated himself at the head of the room. Klaus followed him with his eyes, feeling a familiar prickle on his skin.

The quorum was called to order.

* * *

And suddenly, everything that Klaus and Taki had yet to discuss was brought into the open and passed from hand to hand. As they watched, Taki’s future was being moulded in the air before them.

However, owing to his short replies and grave silences, it didn’t take long for the quorum to see that the young prince wasn’t especially keen to take up the mantle.

Klaus watched him, wondering what he would do or say.

‘If you're not willing, Taki-sama,’ Tachibana tried carefully, his sharp cheekbones accentuating the glint in his eyes. ‘Our family will be honoured to serve in your place. The emperor, may the gods rest his soul, was always forthcoming about his trust in us. If it was not possible for his own kin, I believe your uncle would have approved of a Tachibana dynasty.’

The weight of an entire country, Klaus thought, falling on Taki’s shoulders. It was both typical of his lot and more than he’d ever had to bear before.

Taki remained silent for some time. Klaus, much like Tachibana, he realised uncomfortably, felt his life ticking away.

In his usual firm, quiet voice, Taki then announced to the quorum at large that he had yet to make a decision.

* * *

He wondered why neither he nor Klaus had brought it up. Perhaps the inevitability of it had given them the luxury of not having to bring it up themselves. And now that Klaus had listened in on the quorum, it felt as though there wasn’t much left to say.

‘Sounds like it’s your call and no one else’s,’ Klaus observed. They leaned against the railing of the wooden deck overlooking the sloping grounds. Out there somewhere, Klaus remembered, was their tree.

His words, simple though they were, suddenly recalled something Hans had phrased more eloquently.

_‘Only you can resolve it, Taki-sama. You’re in a truly unique position. In history. In politics. Even in your family. Whether in your role as commander or political leader, whether in this past war or the next, whatever course of action you take will be the first of its kind. It’s a heavy responsibility. I, and others like me, can only ever offer you advice and support in the knowledge that the burden is yours alone.’_

‘What’s holding you back?’ Klaus asked, his huge arms draped over the railing.

Taki didn’t reply. Besides the fear that he wasn’t anywhere near wise or experienced enough to shoulder the duties of an entire nation, there was one poignant thought that had run through his mind for the past few days.

_I’m afraid of losing this._

The wisteria were only just coming into bloom, as were the cherry blossoms by the pier. Rather than falling or cascading, they merely poked their tremulous heads out from branches and twigs as though testing the air.

Klaus then took Taki’s hand, half-concealed in the maroon folds of his robe, and kissed the back of it. Taki flushed. Only the intensity of Klaus’ gaze stopped him from glancing about to make sure no one had seen.

‘No matter what you decide, I’m not going anywhere,’ Klaus said. ‘You’re about to be bound to me for life again. So you won’t have much of a choice, really.’

Taki felt warmth that had nothing to do with the sun’s latest escape from behind the clouds.

'The only other thing I know for a fact is that you'll make one hell of an emperor.'

The colour of his robes suited him, Taki realised, his eyelids lowering slightly. He didn’t try to remove his hand until Klaus released it.

‘But hey, if you do decide to pass it up,’ Klaus said, again gazing across the grounds. ‘Do me a favour and don’t let Tachibana’s creepy uncle keep the throne.’

Taki blinked in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s something about him I don’t trust. If you're looking for advice based on absolutely nothing, I think you should give it to Meiji-sama. I’ve always gotten good vibes from the guy. He might not be interested in the limelight but it’s usually the ones who don’t want power that are best suited for it. Don’t you think?’

Beyond the startling wisdom of Klaus’ words, Taki registered one thing in mild surprise. He’d never heard Klaus call anyone _sama_ before.

* * *

An attendant arrived a few minutes later to remind Taki that he had to perform his purification ritual before the ceremony. They glanced at one another briefly. The next time they saw each other, Klaus would be kneeling and reciting his vows.

As Taki passed, Klaus gently took his arm and leaned as far into the scent of flowers as he dared.

‘After the ceremony,’ he whispered in his ear. ‘Meet me at the tree.’

* * *

Haruki Yamamoto tried to absorb the unearthly peace of his surroundings. He leaned forwards on the bench and reminded himself to look up every now and then.

For the past week, he thought he'd done a commendable job of keeping it to himself. Sure, Ryoumei had thrown him a strange glance or two but beyond that nothing had come up. And so he was free to try, by himself, to battle these new, ridiculous, terrifying –

‘Okay, what’s wrong?’

Shocked out of his thoughts, Haruki looked up. On cue, he turned bright red to see Klaus had thrown himself onto the bench beside him. The captain was wearing robes the colour of the sky which flapped and folded around his huge form, making him look twice his usual size.

‘Klaus-sama!'

Haruki heard his pulse again and tried to focus on what Klaus had just said. Surely, gods help him, he hadn't been that transparent?

'What – what do you mean?’

‘I mean you’ve been moping all day. It’s like you’re pulling a little grey cloud around the grounds. Even I can tell, and that’s saying something.’

‘I…’

They sat before a winding yellow gravel path that led through the grounds. Klaus had been following it when, yet again, his hunt for the tree was hindered. This time the culprit was a glum cadet, who normally was anything but. He now watched Haruki closely.

‘Did those cadets push you around again for standing up for me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good. Because this time I won’t let them off so easy. No one picks on the kid who saved both me and Taki’s hides out there. Giving you my gun doesn’t cover it. Neither will the medals Taki’s about to give you.’

A nervous glance up. Still no smile though, Klaus noticed.

‘But we’re even now,’ said Haruki. ‘You saved me once.’

Klaus reflected. ‘I guess you’re right. Still, though.’

He tried to straighten one of his sleeves that had flapped low on his arm.

‘The robes suit you, Klaus-sama,’ Haruki said kindly, unaware that he had voiced a thought Taki had struggled with moments ago.

‘Thanks, kid. Second time I’m wearing them and I still feel a little ridiculous. Can’t believe the whole country’s going to see me like this.’

‘Are you nervous?’

Klaus let out a short, confident laugh. Then he stopped and looked sideways at Haruki.

‘Okay, yeah,’ he admitted. ‘A little.’

Haruki was surprised.

‘If I mess up my lines, the whole country will see. I might screw up east-west relations worse than the war.’

Haruki finally laughed, after which there was a comfortable pause.

‘Can I ask you something, Klaus-sama?’

Something about his tone changed the atmosphere in a small but tangible way. Klaus’ pulse picked up just a little when he looked back down.

‘Shoot,’ he said, somewhat uncertainly.

The kid knows, he reflected. He saw us on the bike. And in Suguri’s office. Klaus thought he’d be alright with it, but really, in hindsight, how could he have hoped for anyone to be alright with something that jarring, let alone a fourteen year old kid who –

‘How old are you?’ Haruki asked unexpectedly.

The relief Klaus felt was potent. He even chuckled at himself and his momentary paranoia.

‘Me? Twenty-six. Why?’

‘No reason.’

Apparently still deep in thought, Haruki stared at his lap.

‘I get it. You’re wondering how someone this badass is still in their twenties. I ask myself that every day.’

He was relieved to see a smile lift Haruki’s face again even though the kid didn’t look up.

‘Hey, look,’ said Klaus, a little more gently. ‘Whatever’s eating you, don’t worry about it, okay? If it’s not important, it’ll go away. If it’s something you care enough about, you’ll sort it out somehow, even if it takes years. Trust me on that.’

Haruki then met his gaze and nodded. He hoped the captain was right.

And he hoped that it wouldn't take years.

* * *

The pier and the adjoining grounds seemed different without the constant showers of cherry blossom petals. And yet, when the sun occasionally made the water sparkle and when the wind made the little buds on all the branches shiver in synchronisation, the place still managed to seem ethereal. The stuff of the gods, Klaus thought.

Robes flowing, Taki stood in the middle of the pier and the news teams were spoiled for choice in terms of the angle that would best capture him. Hasebe and Uemura stood in the background, their crisp military uniforms providing a striking contrast.

Haruki bowed low as Taki looped the medal around his neck.

Next were Azusa, Date and Moriya, who saluted their commander after their medals were pinned to their chests. Azusa shot Date a warning glance when he looked as though he might repeat his performance in Suguri’s office.

The wind picked up a little when Klaus knelt low on the pier.

Just like last time, Taki’s heart was pounding. Unlike last time, however, it wasn't because of his terrible guilt.

‘I cast aside my nationality, my rights and my kin,' Klaus intoned, eyes closed, each word carrying the full weight of his promise. 'And answer only to my master, who alone controls my destiny.’

Taki watched his hair move in the breeze for a few moments. Then he raised his chin.

‘In return –’

Klaus opened his eyes and glanced up in surprise.

‘In return for your life and your sacrifice, I vow never to let lies nor deceit nor doubt break the bond between master and knight. A bond that is made for life.’

_Never again._

A final gust of wind. Klaus recovered from the surprise in time for a bold repeat; when the wind settled, he had the hem of Taki’s robes clutched firmly in his hand.

He kissed the fabric.

And, entirely unlike their first binding, before every eye on that pier and across the nation, in a way that made Klaus' breath catch in his throat, Taki looked down at Klaus and smiled.

* * *

After the ceremony, under the wisteria, Klaus found Taki waiting for him.

By then, Klaus had shed his immense robes and strode through the grounds in his army jacket and boots, feeling more like himself. He was pleased to note, however, that Taki was still wearing his robes. The spring air was crisp and smelled like it had just been made. 

As he brushed past the swaying arms of wisteria, Taki turned his head slowly. 

We look just like we did ten years ago, Klaus thought. Eleven years now, he realised.

The very first thing he did was pull Taki into a long, deep kiss.

When Taki pulled away, Klaus smiled at the familiar look of abashed shock, now mingled with something new. Something dangerously close to happiness.

‘There might be people around,’ he said, already slightly breathless.

‘I took care of it,’ Klaus assured him.

He’d given the Reizen daughters the important task of ensuring that no one ventured down the yellow gravel road. He instructed them to warn any trespassers with long, excruciatingly detailed stories about spirits that haunted the trees at that time of year. They would be rewarded, they were told, with as many piggy back rides on the back of the tall, benign guardian spirit as they desired.

A simple, inspired plan which left Klaus and Taki free to rest, finally, beneath their tree.

Taki sat against the trunk and Klaus lay his head in his lap, loosening his tie until it draped over his chest and the grass. In his left hand, he absently gripped and twirled the rope braids trailing from the end of Taki’s katana. His eyes never left his master’s face.[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-1.html/6/)

For a long time, neither of them felt the need to speak.

* * *

 _If it’s something you care enough about, you'll sort it out somehow, even if it takes years._ Time to take his own advice.

‘What I said last night,’ Klaus said, his voice slightly hoarse from not having used it for over an hour. ‘About how we have until today to do what we wanted. Until I became your knight again. That’s not the whole story, is it?’

He gently rolled the braids through his fingers.

‘It’s also about you. Your vows to stay pure.’

Taki’s jaw clenched. Even with the lead up of years, even after the nightmare of Hans and all the suffering caused by their inability to speak to one another, he was dismayed to find he was too afraid to broach the subject.

And then, when he looked down and met that gaze, Klaus' gentle, suddenly serious face, his hair both soft and coarse between Taki’s fingers, it didn’t seem as daunting.

‘Not to mince words,’ Klaus continued, ‘but that's been shot to shit, hasn't it?’

He tried a small, self-conscious smile.

‘Any point in stopping now?’

Taki stared back out across the grounds. The wisteria above them bobbed in the breeze. A single petal or two, released prematurely, floated to the ground.

He then began, for the very first time, to try to explain. To explain the commandments carved in him since birth. The vows that shadowed his every footstep. The promise he made to his people and his nation, to shoulder the burden of purity almost as expiation.

Klaus listened. No matter what Taki was saying, he realised, he could lie there and listen to him for the rest of his life.

Eventually, after Taki stopped, he could sense Taki’s uncertainty. That Taki wasn’t sure whether he’d made himself clear enough to someone who had been raised half a world away. So Klaus tried, in his own way, to interpret it.

‘So every time you break your vows, every time I touch you, it's like a notch. And the gods are keeping score.’

Hearing his own words, seeing Taki’s expression, he half-sighed, half-chuckled at himself in frustration.

‘Sorry. I'm just trying to understand. I know it sounds like I'm making fun of it. I'm not.’ Something occurred to him and he tried to hold Taki’s gaze. ‘Just like I'm not trying to humiliate you when we're together.’

A hint of colour brushed Taki’s cheeks. Klaus reached up and touched his jaw and lips.

‘It makes sense, you know. In a way. I slowly started to put it together after what Suguri told me. Until then, though, I had no idea.’

‘How could you have known?’ said Taki quietly. A familiar guilt. ‘I never told you.’

‘I never bothered to try to find out.’

Silence fell for a few minutes.

Klaus then found himself telling Taki about his grandfather. Their rose garden. The scent of the flower that had always been a part of their family, and how they’d tried to find it without any success for generations.

It was Taki’s turn to listen. He was surprised at Klaus’ tone. The faraway look in his eye. It was a side to him he rarely saw.

‘My grandfather used to say _There are those who are like flowers. And we are helpless to go against that sweetness_.’

He kissed Taki’s palm and then grinned.

‘The way I see it, you were always destined to be the rose. And I was always destined to pluck you.’ He winked.

Taki dropped his gaze. The alignment of the two prophecies did strike him as somewhat fated.

Klaus then stretched luxuriously and got to his feet. As Taki watched, he wandered over to the swaying wisteria. _Carry me to where those flowers grow._

‘I've been mulling it over for longer than you think. And as far as I can see it, there's two problems,’ Klaus said almost matter-of-factly. He reached out and ran a hand over the soft petals. ‘The first is about people. Everyone under your command. Your men.’

 _And the entire nation if you become emperor_.

‘What would happen if they find out. But if you ask me, that’s a no-brainer. No one will know. Suguri won't tell anyone. Haruki too. I'd trust the kid with my life at this point. No one will ever know if you don’t want them to.’

 _If anything,_ Taki thought suddenly, remembering what he’d once said to Suguri. _They'll see how much stronger you make me._

There was a pause where Klaus searched for his next thought and found he couldn’t phrase it better than he already did.

‘The second problem is the gods keeping score.’

There was a long pause where Klaus separated a long tendril of flowers from the rest and gently plucked it from the branch. He then turned.

‘After what you told me about Hans,’ said Klaus, his voice dropping, ‘and after everything else that's happened in the past two years. I'm not saying I’m about to dive in and believe everything just like that, but... if they're real and they're watching over us, surely they can see? That this is –’

_This is good. This is love._

He tried a different track.

‘I'm no priest, but it's like they've looked out for us this whole time. Looked out for you. Like they've forgiven you.’

And Taki, despite everything, despite the commandments and the vows and the promises, actually found himself considering it. 

He realised in that moment how much he’d longed for someone to say those words. To tell him that there was nothing sinful shameful disgraceful degrading immoral depraved about how much he wanted Klaus. That he wasn't to be damned. That he would be forgiven. And above all, when everything was said and done, that he would still have Klaus.

He needed to hear those words come from someone outside of the weak, thin voice in his head that he had ignored so often. Even if it was only Klaus grasping at straws so he could look at Taki like that. So that they could be together like this.

It was enough, he realised suddenly, feeling the emotion welling up behind his eyes, to know he wasn't alone in thinking about it.

Klaus returned to the trunk and lay back down on Taki’s lap with a loud, self-satisfied huff. He didn't seem to notice Taki was near tears. For his part, Taki managed to hold himself together.

‘And if not,’ said Klaus, his voice reclaiming its familiar brazenness. ‘If the gods really are keeping score and they're planning to come after you eventually. Let them come.’

He lifted the tress of purple and white flowers that he’d picked and held it near Taki’s hair.

‘They won't get through me.’


	21. Epilogue (end of Part 1)

In the midst of a momentous decision Taki Reizen had to make that would shape his own future and that of his whole nation, Klaus von Wolfstadt received a letter from his sister.

Though neither of them knew it at the time, this letter would have a small hand in shaping all futures.

He read it over slowly, several times, as he sat by himself in his shed.

_Dear Klaus,_

_Hello, little brother! I hope this letter finds you well._

_The whole family saw you on television last week! You looked so handsome in those eastern clothes. I cried a little when they translated what you said. Little Eva was quite taken by your beautiful young master. She hasn’t stopped talking about him since. It’s strange, but I think I understand why you left everything for him, Klaus. Even over the television, I can see there is something about him. I can’t quite explain it. I’m so happy for you both._

_I hate to be the one to cast even the smallest shadow over your happiness, especially when you’re so far away. But I feel I’ve waited long enough to tell you. Please forgive me both for taking so long and for breaking my silence._

_My health has taken a turn over the past year and in the past month especially. I assure you it’s nothing to be alarmed about. But with the master out of the house for work, and with these two rascals to take care of (Heinrich is turning more into you with each passing day, heaven help us), it’s become difficult to find the time to really focus on recovering._

_I beg you not to turn up on my doorstep just for sending this letter. It was for that very reason I put off writing you at all. I’m only letting you know because I’ve been thinking about you a great deal since I saw that beautiful ceremony on television. And because it occurred to me how much I miss you._

_In case you’re ever wandering around in the west again, please swing by the little cottage. The roses are just starting to come out._

_Take care of yourself, Klaus. And be sure to send my love to your young master._

_Love,_

_Claudia_

_PS When his father is out of earshot, Heinrich doesn’t ever stop talking about his uncle, the pilot. He races over living room furniture with his little airplane and has even given himself a call sign. I wish I could remember what it is. I think you would have approved._

To anyone else, it would have sounded like the casual letter it purported to be. But Klaus knew his sister. He knew she wouldn’t be writing him unless it was serious. He also knew she genuinely didn’t want him to drop everything and go to her. It was almost as though she was clearing her conscience by letting him know.

The thought made him run a hand over his face. He held his chin, elbow on his lap, and tried to process everything.

He decided not to tell Taki.

It was the closest he’d ever come to having split loyalties. And yet Taki would win in the end, always, even where his sister was concerned.

But instinct told him that if Taki were to catch wind of his little decision, he would somehow convince Klaus to go.

* * *

‘You should go.’

Klaus left the shower, rubbing his hair with a towel, to see Taki standing by his bed with the letter in his hand.

‘Hey, come on, now. Whatever happened to privacy?’

Taki tried to look away. Water glistened off Klaus’ bare arms and chest. Small trickles ran over his cock and down the muscles of his legs. He made no move to cover himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ Taki said, putting the letter back down on Klaus’ bedside table. ‘I didn’t mean to pry –’

‘I’m kidding. I’m happy you care enough to pry at all. I might leave my journal lying around next time.’

When Klaus moved to his wardrobe, Taki allowed himself one surreptitious glance at his broad back and shoulders before turning away. He thought about Claudia.

‘She didn’t tell you about her condition before now?’ he asked carefully.

As Klaus pulled on his pants, he again felt that new, nagging anxiety. But when he turned, he tried to emulate the casual tone his sister had adopted in the letter.

‘It’s like she said. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’

Taki didn’t believe him.

 _Well done, Wolfstadts,_ Klaus thought. _Masters of deception._

‘You should go,’ Taki repeated, his mind full of the little domestic picture that Claudia had painted. The life Klaus would never have.

_Have you ever asked him? What it’s like to have given everything up for you?_

Klaus sat on the bed, shirt in his hand.

‘I’m not leaving you.’

Taki met a gaze that was both steady and resolute.

‘Plus, don’t you have that tiny decision to make? Something about becoming emperor?’

There was to be another quorum in a week's time where the eight noble families would gather to hear Taki's decision. Little else had been on Taki’s mind. That is, until he read Claudia’s letter.

‘I’ll decide by next week.’

Taki had recognised the tone in Klaus’ voice when he refused to leave. He knew there was only one thing that could sway him. As much as he regretted having to do so, he slipped back into who he once was. For Klaus’ sake.

‘I don’t need you like I needed you during the war,’ he said, allowing a little frostiness to lace his tone. ‘And it sounds like your sister does.’

He saw Klaus’ resolve weaken. A little flash of hurt crossed his features and Taki battened down the guilt.

‘Want to get rid of me that badly, huh?’

‘You won’t be gone long,’ Taki said, his voice still firm, though privately he said it to assure himself as much as Klaus. ‘And you’ll come back when I call for you.’

Klaus took a second to recall the image of his sister. The last thing she said to him in her kitchen as she embraced him. He imagined Heinrich racing over couches and tables with his airplane. He imagined the look on his face when his mother tried to tell him she was sick.

He glanced up into Taki’s eyes and understood what he was doing. He felt a sudden rush of love and gratitude. It was with a huge effort he didn’t channel it by pulling Taki down onto the bed and pinning him beneath his body.

‘You will call for me, won’t you?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

Taki felt both relief and a touch of despair.

‘I will.’

Klaus stood up and kissed him.

* * *

A few days later, as he waited for the train to come to a stop on the platform, he thought about the colour of Taki’s hair in the morning light. He was glad he’d convinced him to stay behind. He wasn’t sure he could have handled an elaborate train-side farewell.

On board, he squeezed past people in the narrow corridor and found an empty compartment. The train lurched to a start and Klaus nearly lost his balance. He swung his bag up on the overhead rack and stood still for a moment, watching the platform inch by.

The last time I was on a train, he thought, but tried to fight it. If he dwelled on thoughts like that for too long, he would be running back down the corridor, demanding that the train be stopped.

Like the gods had read his mind, at that moment the train came to a sudden, screeching halt.

This time, Klaus lost his balance completely. He fell forwards and his forehead collided painfully with the overhead rack.

Wincing and rubbing his forehead, Klaus glanced out the window to see they had barely cleared the platform. He wondered whether there was a problem with the train. Whether he should take that as a sign –

 _Stop it,_ he told himself. He sighed and sat heavily on the seat.

Around thirty seconds later, he had the shock of his life when the glass door of the compartment slid open and Taki stepped in.

The train cautiously moved off again.

* * *

Even when the train picked up speed and the vista outside began to shoot past, even when Taki took the seat opposite him and nervously avoided his eye, Klaus still had trouble accepting he was there.

‘What are you doing?’ he finally asked, hearing that his voice carried how winded he felt.

As he watched Taki struggle to come up with a reply, something occurred to him.

‘Did – did you order them to stop the train?’

At the look on Taki’s face, Klaus laughed loudly, his mind still reeling. He rubbed his forehead again.

‘That hurt, you know.’

‘It occurred to me that I had been hypocritical in my advice to you,’ said Taki softly, eyes out the window. It sounded almost as though he'd rehearsed the words in his head. ‘I made my decision recently. In the wake of it, it would seem my people no longer need me like they did during the war. And – and it sounds like you do.’

Klaus was almost relieved; he was most definitely dreaming.

* * *

As Taki slowly told him everything, Klaus noticed the small suitcase Taki had left by the door. Still dazed, he lifted it onto the overhead rack beside his own.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, realising how ridiculous a question it was in the face of Taki’s staggering decision. A decision that could change history, he thought numbly.

‘I’ve asked Hasebe to speak on my behalf at the quorum next week. All the arrangements were made this morning.’

Klaus stared. The timing of it was impossible to ignore. He dared to wonder. 

_How much of this is because of me?_

Instead, he asked, ‘So are the – the Tachibanas going to be running things?’

‘No,’ Taki replied evenly. ‘I’ve asked Meiji-sama to consider taking the throne. He said he would decide by the quorum next week. In any case, I’ve made it clear that the decision is in his hands now, not mine.’

He then glanced at Klaus. ‘Meiji-sama asked me to pass on his thanks for your vote of confidence in his leadership.’

From one shock to another.

‘You took my advice?’ Klaus said with a small, incredulous smile.

Taki kept his eyes on his lap.

 _I once made the mistake of not doing that,_ he thought, his mind turning briefly to Hans.

‘It’s the right decision,’ he said. ‘I can feel it.’

He’s never spoken like that before, Klaus thought. It was rare to see him make a move based on his heart rather than his head.

It would take another few hours before the reality of everything caught up to Klaus. Before he allowed himself the thought that Taki would be with him in the cottage with the roses. That he would meet Eva and Heinrich. And Claudia.

But right then, even before he caught up properly, he felt something blossoming in his chest. Like a little flower with flames for petals, opening slowly.

The left side of Taki’s face was lit up in the glare from the window. His dark eyes glittered. Klaus tried to control himself.

He cast a quick glance out the door.

‘No Uemura or Hasebe or attendants or anything?’

Taki hesitated.

‘No.’

His heart thudded when Klaus flashed him a wicked grin.

* * *

Despite the fact that Klaus had given him plenty of forewarning, Taki still managed to be caught off guard when he was pushed down into the sun-warmed grass of the field.

The train had taken its scheduled stop at the water supply point. Everything happened exactly as it did before. Klaus helped Taki from the train, happily ignoring the distrusting gazes of several train workers. They took in the sun glimmering on the wheat stalks. They stared out at the distant mountains bordering Taki’s country that they’d left behind.

And then Klaus suggested they take a walk. Just like the first time, Taki led the way.

Now, the wheat stalks were being crushed beneath Taki’s back. Klaus deftly removed Taki's coat and shirt but left them on the ground as a cushion. He slipped Taki’s pants past his ankles and spread his legs before him.

It was like the sun painted his body a different shade. Klaus was pleased to see that all of Taki's strength had returned. His eyes drank in the lithe muscles of his stomach and legs. Bending low, Klaus ran his tongue on the inside of Taki's thigh.

He could be anything, Klaus thought. A prince, an emperor, a commander, an alley cat, a bird, a rose. But really, beneath it all, this was who he was. And he was Klaus’.

Fingers and then tongue. Klaus probed deep, occasionally drawing back to spit into his hole before delving in again. Into Taki's heat. His familiar taste. His warm flesh gripped in Klaus’ hands.

Taki, meanwhile, was focusing all his energy on stifling his cries. They were not so far out that train workers and nearby farmers wouldn't hear.

The wheat stalks dipped their heads over the scene, bobbing with each gust of wind. Not a single cloud obscured the warm spring sun.

He didn’t expect Klaus to lift him up and spin him around. A strong hand held him face-down against his rumpled coat and shirt. Klaus’ cock then pushed in with such force that nothing on Earth could have stifled the cry that escaped him.

‘ _Ah!_ Ugh, Klaus…!’

Klaus held his hips in place and watched his cock piston in and out of Taki. The brightness of the scene, combined with Taki’s moans, made his climax approach a lot sooner than he would have liked.

Taki felt, again, how deep Klaus was. How far into his body Klaus had gone. How much of Taki belonged to him.

He suddenly felt Klaus’ hand clamp down on his mouth. Klaus had pressed himself low over Taki’s back, his chin hooked over Taki’s shoulder.

‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this,’ he gasped, still thrusting even as he spoke. ‘But you need to keep your voice down. They might find us. And I doubt it’ll be Suguri this time.’

He then spun Taki back around and drove his cock back into him as he kissed him, feeling Taki moan into his mouth, grinding him into the soil.

After they came, they lay still for minutes. The silence was suddenly damning; Taki realised with a flush how much noise they had made.

‘I think we’re good,’ Klaus assessed, though he still kept an ear out.

He kissed the place beneath Taki’s ear where his neck met his hair. Their hands lay intertwined, almost forgotten, in the stalks.

* * *

_AN HOUR EARLIER_

‘Remember what happened last time we were on this train?’

He got up slowly and Taki’s pulse raced. The door to the compartment was entirely transparent, he thought. Surely –

‘I mean, we were in a much nicer compartment,’ Klaus continued, his voice rumbling. ‘That bed was handy, wasn’t it?’

Klaus stood directly in front of him, relishing the look on Taki’s face. He lifted a knee and placed it on the seat beside Taki. He imagined, briefly, Taki’s mouth around his cock. The sounds he would make as Klaus pushed into his throat. The shocked look of the conductor when he passed their compartment.

Just as Taki’s anxiety reached its peak, Klaus chuckled and leaned away. He lowered himself to the plush leather of the seat and, in deference to the happiness he experienced in Suguri’s office and under the wisteria, he lay his head in Taki’s lap again, eyes closed.

‘Wake me if we stop by that field. I want to see you in the sunlight again, like the last time we were here.’

_But this time, I’m going to fuck you properly._

Eyes half-lidded, Taki stared for a time at Klaus’ face. He felt the echo of a thought he had long ago. How everything about him was foreign. The wisps of blond splayed on his lap. The heavy, self-assured jaw. Even his tanned skin seemed somehow oversaturated. Implausible.

Taki touched his hair. And then turned to stare out the window. The sky, in that moment, seemed like nothing more than a colour; something that he could easily push through if he were to reach out and touch it.

Klaus, his eyes still closed, didn’t get to see his small smile.

Although he could have attributed it to a few things, Taki smiled mostly because of how impossible it had once seemed.

_If only you and I could fly away together, to the other side of the sky._

 

**END**

**(of Part 1)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> COLLAPSES WITH RELIEF.
> 
> I can’t believe I thought I could fit all that into five chapters. So glad it’s finally done! I really hope you guys enjoyed it!
> 
> Not surprisingly, my author’s note is going to be a long one:
> 
> POLITICS  
> In my view, Eurote always came across as super dodgy even though they were Taki’s allies. They started the war, after all. And there was all that craziness with the Duchess and Berkut. The whole thing felt a bit like Japan and Italy being on the same side in WW2. In this reality, it’s like the Axis powers won but (thanks to Klaus lol) the horrifying potential of fascism winning the war was stopped anyway.
> 
> Emperor drama. Meiji-sama, one of my OCs, is the emperor while Taki goes off gallivanting with Klaus in the west. For any Saezuru fans: I seriously love the idea of Yashiro being emperor of imperial Japan – how much does that suit him?!
> 
> APOLOGIES  
> A lot of non-canon things to apologise for:
> 
> Hans Regenwalde and his goddamn psychicness. Blanket apology. His power was the foundation of this story when I imagined it and I loved writing him, but I’m well aware that his gift is a massive non-canon blasphemy (forgive me readers and Inariya-sama!).
> 
> Haruki’s age. He looks about ten or eleven when he first meets Klaus. And this story’s set only a few months after that. So Haruki’s magically gained three years and several inches of height (and a serious crush) in less than half a year.
> 
> Klaus’ sister. Is Claudia even still alive? Klaus saw her when he was nearly dying by the river which made me wonder if he saw her in the afterlife. If she is dead – oops! There goes all of Part 2.
> 
> Technology. Pretty sure I made radios and interception a lot more digital-era than WW2-era. Also was TV around in Inariya’s version of 1928? I just really wanted to heighten the globalness and vividness of the ending. Also, while Enigma’s a real codebreaking machine the Germans used in WW2, I highly doubt that you can use it the way Frederik Scholz did haha.
> 
> And please forgive any and all other details that are blasphemous that I've missed (and happy to hear about if you pick up on it btw!)
> 
> THE FUTURE  
> For the sake of emotional relief and so you don’t have to keep reading my endless updates, I’m more than happy if you consider the end of Part 1 the proper ending of the whole thing :D Sex and a train and sex thoughts on a train and sex near a train and Klaus laughing and Taki smiling was all just so nice to write and I think, maybe, it has the ring of an ending to it.
> 
> But I’m just going to write the rest of the story anyway. Because I might go mad if I don’t.
> 
> So if there’s anyone left who might want to keep following, Part 2 and 3 are next! Although I’ve split the story up into three parts, neither Parts 2 nor 3 are as long as Part 1. Then again, I’m terrible at keeping things short, so maybe don’t take my word on that.
> 
> In Part 2, called ‘On the Other Side of the Sky’, we follow Klaus and Taki to the cottage with the roses. Claudia finally meets the mysterious man from the east who so completely stole her brother’s heart. The beginning of Part 2 is well past the war, well past Hans Regenwalde, well past negativity. Okay, most negativity. (Klaus’ patriotic and vaguely racist brother-in-law is a different story.)
> 
> And if you’re wondering what the hell is happening in the prologue, that’s not until the end of Part 3 (which is called ‘Haruki’). Sorry guys! I might as well have called this Maiden Rose: The Final 3,000 Chapters -____- But like I said, I totally won’t take it personally if you guys stop following at Part 1.
> 
> If it helps, for those of you who want to keep following, I’ve decided just for the sake of symbolism/poetry/wankiness I would finish the entire story while Klaus and I are the same age. (I took it as a sign that I read the manga last December so I’m going to finish my story in the same year *downs coffee despite caffeine allergy). Oh I just remembered Klaus is 36 for most of Part 3… WELL hopefully I won’t wait that long.
> 
> GREAT BIG THANKS  
> Thank you to absolutely everyone for all of your amazing, tear-jerking comments. And thank you also to my kudosers and subscribers! 
> 
> Looking forward to hearing from you, whatever you hated and loved and anything in between! Your support has been absolutely wonderful, it’s honestly my favourite part of the whole process. Again, hope you all enjoyed!


	22. They Have a Secret Language

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to Part 2! Thank you so much for sticking around this long, I can't tell you how happy it makes me to know that anyone at all is reading any of this! 
> 
> So things will wind down a lot from here on out, especially compared to the previous part (and then things pick up again, though somewhat differently, towards the middle of Part 2 and then again in Part 3). There will be some big decisions coming up but the next chapters will mostly be a respite from the real world, especially for Taki.
> 
> A small note on something I sort of mentioned in the last author's note but something LBx made me think about a bit more: I apologise once more for television haha! In my head we're in the our-world equivalent of the 1940s, meaning TV will become a widespread thing in a little under a decade. So I've pushed that whole thing forward by ten years (just rewriting history over here, no biggie). Hope it's not too jarring for everyone!
> 
> Anyway, I'll be happy if you find even a small amount of enjoyment in the rest of the story. Thank you once again for all your love for the boys. And as always, if you get the chance, I would absolutely love to hear from you :)

**PART 2** :  **ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY**

   
‘Taki, wake up. We’re here.’

His voice lifted Taki out of an unsettling dream about grey eyes and russet hair. He realised, when he came to, that his head was on Klaus' shoulder.

For the first time in days, the train was still.

After indulging in the momentary pleasure of watching Taki open his eyes, Klaus turned to look back out the window, his mood again as damp as the weather. Over the past few hours, as the train entered Klaus’ country and headed even further west towards the countryside, the clouds had gathered in ever-darkening shades. And finally, as they pulled into the station, the thin drizzle gave way to proper rain.

Klaus was surprised at how disappointed he was. So much for his plan to show Taki how the sun glinted off fields of gold.

After Taki lifted off his shoulder, Klaus stood up and stretched. He pulled their suitcases down from the overhead rack. Passengers slowly filed down the hallway outside their compartment, weary from the journey.

No matter how much Klaus had insisted on an upgrade, they had spent the last three days in coach.

‘You sure you’re happy to slum it with us common folk?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

And so they slept apart on the seats. Klaus once awoke and guiltily watched as the train’s bumping knocked Taki’s arm off the seat.

He was also not happy to learn that Hasebe had arranged for Taki to stay in an inn that was a twenty minute walk from the cottage.

‘I can’t impose on your sister,’ said Taki, suspecting that the cottage wouldn't have enough rooms to separately accommodate both himself and Klaus. ‘Especially with no notice like this.’

‘You’re crazy. I’m not letting you stay in a hotel. The ones in our town are barely even hotels.’

Taki didn’t reply.

‘What’s the point of you coming if you’re not going to stay with us?’

‘I want to help however I can without being a burden.’

Klaus had sighed and sulked for a few minutes before he forced himself to see things in perspective. He focused on the amazing fact that Taki was with him at all. Besides, he suspected that if he and Claudia combined forces they would be able to change his mind.

And so he tried to stay positive as he and Taki stepped onto a platform drenched with rain.

‘More slumming,’ he informed Taki after they ducked into the shelter of the echoing station. ‘We need to catch a bus into my neck of the woods. Then it’s a bit of a walk after that. If I knew you were coming I would have organised for a car or something.’

‘It’s fine,’ Taki repeated patiently as they walked across to the open exit.

He again found himself observing how the identity of a nation somehow infiltrated every nook and cranny of its territory. Even in that simple little train station bereft of any noteworthy sights, Taki could sense something of the west. Perhaps in the voices and clothes. The architecture. A certain character Taki couldn’t define.

After they drew up to the street exit Klaus saw that the old bus shelter outside was taken down. There was only a bus schedule propped on a stand. And wet pavement. Yet more slumming, he thought. And on the one day I bring a prince from the east with me.

‘Wait with the bags. I’ll check bus times.’

He left his suitcase by Taki’s feet and ducked out of the station entrance into the rain. He accidentally jostled an umbrella held up by a tall, slender girl with blonde hair cut in a bob.

‘Pardon me,’ he said in the Eastern language, forgetting for a moment where he was.

The girl gave him a strange look before passing into the station.

Klaus smiled at himself and then glanced around at the scattered groups of people in front of the station. Blondes and brunettes all, with only one or two darker heads among them. Even here, close to the countryside, a few of the women wore wedge-like heels and curled, coiffed hair. Almost all the men wore fedoras and long trench coats. And almost everyone was a great deal taller than Klaus was used to. He had only been gone a year but it he realised it would take a while to get acclimatised to home.

He caught a few bursts of his native tongue as people walked by and felt the first tug of nostalgia. He hadn’t missed it while he was gone, he realised, but now that he was back –

‘Is that an _oriental?_ ’

‘Where?’

‘There, in the station.’

Klaus’ ears rang. He stopped and turned. Three men and a woman were heading towards the station entrance where Taki stood.

‘My God, so it is,’ one of the men was saying. ‘What the hell’s one of them doing out here?’

‘Think he’s lost?’ the woman asked with a scathing little snigger.

‘I’ll be happy to show him the way home,’ another one replied, an idle threat lacing his voice.

Their voices grew faint as they drew away. Klaus stared after them for a beat or two, his hands in fists. But when they walked past Taki, who didn’t even look at them, Klaus tried to calm himself. It would be a poor omen if he caused a scene on the first day of Taki’s arrival.

They’re harmless, Klaus told himself as he turned back around. Harmless idiots.

Despite the fact that Taki had dealt with his fair share of bigotry in Luckenwalde, Klaus still spent part of the train journey worrying about what Taki might have to face now. Not only had the west lost resoundingly to the east, it was fair to say that the loss owed a great deal to Taki himself.

Klaus wondered how recognisable Taki would be to the locals. He tried to find solace in the fact that very few families in the countryside owned a television set. He tried not to think about the likelihood that Taki’s face had made it into the newspapers more than once.

He then realised he’d been standing in front of the bus schedule for several seconds without having read any of the times. He tried to focus.

* * *

‘I think I’ve seen him before.’

The three men and the woman were sitting together on one of the benches, luggage pooled around their feet, shaking rain from their umbrellas. Taki stood a few paces away.

‘Who?’

‘The oriental.’

Assuming they were safe behind their language, not a lot of effort was put into keeping their voices down. Taki listened quietly, eyes on his shoes.

‘How could you have seen him before?’

‘I don’t know. His face is familiar somehow.’

‘That’s because they all look alike.’

This inspired a hearty round of laughter. Taki could imagine how the woman demurely hid her smile behind a gloved hand.

‘Well, they do!’ the same male voice insisted, clearly pleased with their reaction.

‘I can’t believe we lost to them.’ A deep voice. Slightly less amused than the other three. ‘Such a disgrace.'

‘Isn’t it?’ The woman let out a petulant sigh.

‘The Kaiser should abdicate the throne. You know what they say, right? That he made a deal with their emperor. That’s why they won.’

‘I haven't heard anything like that.’

‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. Do you really think a few left-wing rioters in our country would have been enough to throw the whole war?’

‘I don’t –’

‘There was a deal, trust me. Some kind of pact to help the Kaiser keep his throne. How else do you explain how that little nothing of a country beat us?’

His gruff tenor had a quality Taki had heard before in some politicians. The kind of voice and tone that immediately disparaged all opposition, whether it had been voiced or not. Such certainty, Taki thought. It was almost laudable.

‘Whatever the case,’ said the one who had made his little joke earlier. ‘I hope we don’t see more of them around here anytime soon.’

‘The nerve of them,’ the woman agreed.

‘At least he’s not wearing one of those dresses they like so much.’

They laughed again. Taki listened some more but the topic soon turned from him. He hadn’t moved a muscle since they started talking.

‘Our bus!’ the woman suddenly announced.

A large yellow monster belching steam had pulled up to the curb right alongside the bus schedule. Taki looked up and noticed that Klaus was no longer there.

The group scrambled for their bags and took off into the rain only to have to stand in a small queue that had gathered in front of the bus doors. The echoes of their spirited conversation and laughter lingered in the station. Taki took a deep breath. He glanced over his shoulder at where they had been sitting.

Lying beneath the bench was what looked like a woman’s patent leather suitcase.

* * *

They were light-heartedly squabbling over bus fare when a firm, quiet voice spoke up from behind them.

‘Excuse me, Ma'am.’

All four turned to see the young foreigner standing in the rain, holding out the suitcase.

‘I think you left this behind.’

Right down to specific accents and inflections, he was fluent in their mother tongue.

It was a terrible moment. All four were struck dumb. The woman, eyes wide, reached out from under her umbrella to take her bag. Her shock was so great that she completely forgot to thank him.

For Taki, it should have been enough seeing their stunned faces. A few of them were even beginning to turn red when they recalled the details of the conversation he would easily have heard and understood.

And yet, as he turned to go, something stirred in him that he hadn’t felt since Luckenwalde. So he faced them again and flicked his now-damp hair out of his eyes.

‘Forgive me for putting too fine a point on it, but your Kaiser is nothing more than a figurehead. He doesn’t hold any real political power. Not enough to change the outcome of a war and certainly not enough to make a deal with my late uncle, the emperor.’

His voice didn’t lift in pitch or volume at all and yet the words sliced through the small, red-faced party. Taki thought he could identify the tenor who had divulged his conspiracy theory; a tall man with a thick moustache and his lips slightly parted in mild shock. He directed his words at him.

‘Anyone with a basic understanding of your own politics could tell you that much. I’m surprised you had to hear it first from an oriental.’

The rain fell steadily around them, glancing off their umbrellas and Taki’s shoulders. By then, the queue had filed into the bus and bus driver stared at the strange gathering on the pavement, wondering if they were coming on board.

Taki wondered about saying anything else. There were a few more things lining up like infantry in his mind. Instead, he inclined his head slightly and turned to head back into the station.

And, just three steps later, nearly ran into Klaus.

* * *

Klaus stood beneath an umbrella, newly purchased from a nearby stand, which he now held over Taki. The smile on his face made Taki blush for the first time since he’d left the shelter of the station.

As they walked back, Klaus didn’t say anything at first. Taki prayed he hadn’t been within earshot.

‘I,’ said Klaus finally, ‘have never heard you say so many words in my life.’

Taki’s cheeks burned even more.

‘I – I lost my temper.’

‘That was you losing your temper? Sounded more like the smoothest verbal take-down I’ve seen in years. They didn’t know what hit them.’

He was still smiling when they sat on the bench near their bags and Klaus furled the umbrella closed.

‘To be fair, we could have done without the announcement that you’re related to the emperor,’ he reflected.

Taki had realised this immediately after he had spoken.

‘I know. I was being immature. I shouldn’t have –’

‘Hey, I’m kidding.’ Klaus rummaged in his bag and tossed him a towel. ‘I’m proud of you.’

Holding the towel, Taki glanced at him in surprise. Klaus sat back comfortably on the seat, hands behind his head.

‘Just a few minutes ago, I was worrying about how to rescue you from idiots like them while we’re here. But you did a better job rescuing yourself than I ever could.’

A few raindrops fell from Taki’s fringe and dripped down his jaw. Klaus gave a loud sigh.

‘Would you hurry up and dry your hair? Seeing you like that’s making me want to do things to you.’

Taki automatically cast a nervous glance around the station before he realised Klaus was speaking the language of the east.

With nothing else to do, he started towelling his hair and shoulders, aware that Klaus’ eyes never left him.

* * *

As though the fates were pleased with Taki’s defiant little stand, their bus slowly wound its way out of the cover of rainclouds.

Taki watched as cobbled streets and low brick buildings gave way to fields and remote farmhouses. Mountains, tinged lilac due to the distance, swam on the edge of every scene. He saw fields of corn and wheat. Rows of planted vegetables that filed neatly past. People bent over in the soil, their backs laden with produce fresh from earth.

 _Even in the middle of nowhere, people go about their life’s work,_ he had once observed aloud.

 _People go on living wherever they are,_ Klaus had replied, reaching for a stalk of wheat the colour of his hair. _They cultivate whatever land is there._

He had then turned to look at Taki. _That’s what you left your country by yourself to find out, right?_

Taki remembered with a start that he had smiled in response. Perhaps it had been easier to do so back then. Before things had gotten far too heavy. Before he started wearing guilt like a mantle.

 _Yes,_ Taki had said. _I guess it was._

Now unburdened of that mantle, and, for the moment, all other duties as well, he let his eyes roam the fields freely. A rain-drenched station and a patent leather suitcase and hateful words were already beginning to feel like relics.

The road was still wet with the memory of rain. But the further west they headed, the stronger the sunshine. Klaus’ spirits were high enough that they were in danger of lifting the bus clean off the ground.

Two hours later, they stepped off the bus onto a quiet, dry dirt road bordered by fields. There, the sky looked as though it had never known a single cloud.

* * *

As they walked through stillness unique to the countryside, hearing only rustling grass and twittering birds, Taki asked about the cottage.

‘Technically, it’s still mine,’ Klaus said. ‘But before I left last year, I told Claudia it was hers if she and her husband wanted it. Not much point in my keeping it, after all. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to come back at all, not even like this.’

 _Thank God for Mussolin,_ he thought dryly. Nothing like a common enemy to temper relations between east and west.

‘They moved in not long after I left. Her husband, Wilhelm, worked the fields until the war called him up.’

‘He was a soldier?’

A passing pick-up truck honked at them merrily and they stepped to the side. Klaus waved at the sunburned old man behind the wheel who gave them a wide, gap-toothed grin.

‘No. He was drafted to work in the mines closer to the capital. Copper or aluminium or something. Something for weapons. He’s a patriot through and through so I doubt he minded all that much. He’s still there, I think. They’re probably winding down for peacetime like we are and holding back a lot of the labourers until they’re finished.’

He looked at Taki and debated over saying anything more.

‘He’s, uh… not my biggest fan. We always managed to find something to argue about. And I doubt my running off to the east helped with how he thinks of me. Good thing he won’t be back for a while. Hopefully he won’t turn up at all.’

Taki remained silent. Wilhelm Strauss, he thought with a flicker of worry.

* * *

After just a few minutes beneath the springtime sun, Taki removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves to his elbows.

To the left of the road, tall bristly grass ran right to the edge of a grove of trees.

‘I want to show you something,’ Klaus said suddenly. He left the path and crunched through dry grass. Taki hesitated and followed, loathe to dampen Klaus’ enthusiasm.

When they entered the cool shade of the trees, the cicadas screeching at them from all directions, Taki’s arm was yanked forwards and he dropped his coat and suitcase. In one swift motion, Klaus had pressed him hard against a tree trunk, his eyes flashing.

‘Klaus –’

Protests smothered once more by a hard kiss. Taki’s head was pushed back into the bark. Klaus’ tongue was in his mouth, searching out Taki’s, teasing it, coaxing it up and out. Klaus’ hands, first on Taki’s face then his neck, were warm from the sun.

Taki gripped the back of his coat, feeling a familiar rush. But his mind was still on the road which was highly visible from where they were.

When Klaus bent down to kiss his neck, Taki tried again.

‘Klaus, we can’t. People might see.’

Klaus’ cock twitched at the breathlessness of Taki’s voice.

They were there because Klaus had momentarily caved to a powerful, irrational desire. He wanted to make sure Taki had retained his scent even out here. Even in the west. Far from the land of wisterias and cherry blossoms. It was sweet relief to discover that he had. Klaus breathed deep.

And then, with no small amount of self-control, he pulled away, one hand still cupping Taki’s face.

‘Just a little something to tide me over,’ he said, and Taki’s stomach flipped at the look in his eye. He pulled at Taki's earlobe with his teeth. ‘Until I get to eat you properly. Not sure when that’ll be.’

He kissed Taki swiftly one final time and then stepped away. Taki tried to fix the back of his hair, his mind still swimming. Klaus picked up both their suitcases and only handed Taki his own after he insisted.

* * *

Back on the road, Taki braced himself and asked a question he had been putting off for a while.

‘Does… Does Claudia know?’

Klaus threw him a guilty look.

‘I may have made a few hints before I left.’ He paused. ‘A few very strong hints.’

Another pause.

‘Okay, she knows,’ he admitted finally. He was both relieved and anxious that Taki didn’t react. ‘But she's the most trustworthy person in the world. You’ll see. And she doesn't judge, I promise.’

Taki had already suspected as much but it did nothing for his nerves. Nerves that had begun to build over the past few minutes.

* * *

The sun was nearing its highest point in the sky.

‘Not long now.’

The land rose a little bit ahead of them. On one side, tall stalks of corn grew above their heads. On the other was a field of bright green potato sprouts planted in rows, glinting almost wetly in the sunlight.

Their nervousness increased with each step up the incline.

They were nervous for different reasons. Taki was beset by fears about how he would be received by the Strauss family. Whether they would find his presence intrusive and unnecessary. Whether they simply wouldn't get along. Whether Klaus would think any less of him if that were the case.

Klaus, despite having absolutely no worries on that front, was remembering how Taki’s arm had fallen off the seat as he slept on the train. He had watched Taki at the station and on the bus and here, now, walking up a dirt road that was as familiar to Klaus as if he’d been there the previous day. They were all reminders of the life he had once tried to sell to Taki beneath the laburnums of Luckenwalde.

Even with Taki here, or perhaps because of it, it seemed even less realistic. Perhaps it seemed so now, he reflected, after a full year of seeing Taki in his homeland. Where he was treated like the royalty he was. Where he was surrounded by the comforts and adoration and privileges that he deserved.

Klaus tried to remain in the present. They wouldn’t be here long, after all. He would take care of Claudia as best as he could and then they would return to the land of wisteria and cherry blossoms. He tried to recall the happiness he felt on the bus over the simple realisation that the sun would, in fact, be shining on the cottage with the rose garden.

Despite all of that, he was still nervous. And he thought he could sense something similar in Taki.

In a few short minutes, before they got to the top of the incline, they became aware of the new, very specific tension between them. One that seemed utterly ridiculous after everything they’d been through.

And then, with no warning, a tiny Klaus came tumbling out of the corn stalks.

* * *

Wearing a paper hat and brandishing a broad-edged wooden sword, he emerged onto the road a little ahead of them and appeared to be locked in serious combat with an enemy only he could see. 

All of Klaus' nervousness evaporated in an instant.

‘Heinrich!’

The sword paused in mid-air and the boy turned. He looked about four or five. Short sandy hair and a fierce yellow gaze that took in the newcomers with surprise and mistrust. And then with wide-eyed happiness.

‘ _Uncle Klaus!_ ’

His paper hat blew off as he ran full tilt towards them. Klaus’ laugh rumbled from deep in his chest. He set his suitcase on the ground and swept the boy up into the air.

‘There’s no way you’re my nephew,’ he declared, gazing up at him. ‘Last time I saw you, you were the size of a kitten!’

‘No, I wasn’t!’ Heinrich protested, his indignation betrayed by a wide smile.

‘Yes, you were. And you were clinging to your mother’s skirt! Remember?’

‘Nuh _uh!_ ’

Klaus propped him up on his hip and turned to Taki, who, Klaus was elated to discover, was smiling.

The little reunion had managed to dispel even Taki’s anxieties. There was absolutely nothing daunting about the world, Taki realised, if it could allow for a moment like that. Where he was able to watch Klaus holding his mini-me while both grinned from ear to ear.

‘Heinrich, I want to meet someone,’ said Klaus. ‘This is Taki.’

‘Hello!’ said Heinrich brightly with a few waves of the sword he was still clutching.

The similarities were remarkable. The same hair and narrow eyes. Even something in the shape of his eyebrows and wide smile.

‘Hello, Heinrich,’ Taki said.

Klaus wanted to weld that smile onto his memory. He turned to Heinrich and grit his teeth fondly.

‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.

‘In the house,’ Heinrich answered, suddenly engrossed with a notch he found on his sword. ‘She told me not to play and get my clothes dirty because Uncle Klaus is coming today.’

His shirt front and shoes were covered in flecks of mud.

Klaus chuckled and picked up his suitcase with his free hand.

‘Well done, buddy.’

‘Can you get my hat?’

As they resumed their way up the path, Taki picked it up for him.

* * *

When they came over the incline, Taki’s breath caught in his throat.

The corn field ended abruptly and gave way to a sea of wheat that was painted a rich, mellow gold. Wind brushed through the stalks in delicate ripples, making it seem like a giant sheet of yellow with little threads being pulled.

The path wound between the stalks and ended at a small cottage not far from them, bounded by a small gate. Warm, off-white brick and dark shingle roof. Slatted shutters thrown open on all the windows.

And suddenly, Taki was certain he’d been there before. It was like he'd experienced a burst of nostalgia for a place he was seeing for the first time. He struggled to understand it.

They made their way to the cottage. The stalks on the edges of the path brushed against their legs as they walked. The air smelled of earth and grains.

‘What do you think?’ asked Klaus a little nervously, though he was pleasantly surprised by the look on Taki’s face.

Before Taki had the chance to answer, the short wooden gate swung open and a girl, around six years old, stood on the threshold. She stared at the little group for a few seconds.

‘Mama!’ she called suddenly over her shoulder. Even when she yelled, her voice came out refined and measured. ‘He’s here!’

She then walked towards them. She had darker hair the colour of old honey. It was tied neatly back with a ribbon and there wasn’t a spot on her white dress.

‘Eva, look at you,’ said Klaus warmly when she stopped before him. ‘You’re practically a lady.’

She gave him a small smile that twinkled in her eyes.

‘Hello, Uncle Klaus,’ she said primly, hugging him around the middle and making a face at Heinrich who took advantage of his new height to try to slide his sword through the loops of her ribbon.

Then she pulled back and looked at the stranger with interest. From up close, Taki couldn’t see much of Klaus in her, though she was quite pretty. Her eyes were huge and round.

And her small mouth opened in shock.

‘You’re him!’ she said, almost to himself.

Taki blinked down at her, not knowing what to say.

‘Eva, this is Taki,’ Klaus said.

Still her huge eyes drank him in. Then she found her voice again.

‘We saw you on the television,’ she informed him. ‘And Mama says you’re even more handsome than Arnold van Reagan.’

Taki looked at Klaus questioningly.

‘Claudia’s favourite actor,’ he explained, struggling not to laugh. ‘She must have taken them to see the pictures.’ He then looked at Eva with a little grin Taki recognised. ‘Do you agree with your mama?’

At that, Eva held her hands behind her back and blushed faintly.

‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.

Klaus laughed.

‘Looks like she takes after her uncle even more than Heinrich does.’

‘Uncle Klaus!’ Heinrich suddenly complained, startled by the strange new sounds Klaus had made. ‘What did you just say? Is that a secret language?’

‘No, buddy. Just a little joke between me and Taki.’

Eva graciously held the gate door open for them and blushed again when Taki thanked her.

* * *

As they drew up to the front door, Taki thought about Heinrich’s complaint.

‘Klaus,’ he said. ‘We should speak in your language while we’re here. As a courtesy to Claudia and the children.’

Klaus set Heinrich down and he immediately darted through the front door, calling for his mother.

‘Are you sure?' asked Klaus. 'They won’t mind.’

‘I’m sure.'

 _‘Wie Sie wünschen, mein Meister,’_ Klaus said with a wink. As you wish, my Master.

* * *

‘Klaus, is that you?’ a woman's voice called from inside.

Taki waited for Klaus to enter first. Before he stepped out of sight into the hallway, Taki thought he saw Klaus’ face darken.

Claudia was in a wheelchair at the doorway to the living room, a thin blanket draped over her lap. Though her smile was the same, her face was a great deal thinner than Klaus remembered.

She saw the look on his face before he knelt down to hug her.

‘Please don't be upset,’ she implored him after he pulled away and kept staring. ‘I don’t even really need this thing. The doctor makes me use it because I get tired easily these days. I didn't want to worry you – oh my!’

She looked round to see that Taki Reizen had stepped uncertainly into the hallway. Her hand flew to her mouth and little points of colour appeared on her cheeks. Klaus turned.

‘Claudia, this is –’

‘Oh hush, Klaus, of course I know who it is!’ she said, sounding dazed.

She slowly wheeled towards Taki, who then saw whom Eva took after. Claudia's hair, also slightly darker than Klaus’, was gathered in a bun, with a few loose strands framing her delicate face. Round, kind eyes, a small mouth and a dainty chin. Her dress had lace collars at the throat and wrists.

After a few moments, though traces of shock still lingered, she reached out a hand and held Taki’s gently.

‘It is such an honour to have you here.’

‘Mrs. Strauss –’ Taki began.

‘Oh, none of that, please! Call me Claudia.’

‘I hope you can forgive the intrusion. I was unable to give you any notice. There was a last minute change of plans –’

‘Nonsense, this is such a wonderful surprise. I just – oh!’ Her hand was at her lips again. ‘How silly of me, I don’t even know the proper way to address you!’

Taki smiled again, the little butterflies of nervousness now giving way to the warmth Claudia so effortlessly exuded.

‘Please call me Taki.’

As Klaus watched the simple coming together of the two most important people in his life, it occurred to him that he had never heard Taki say anything like that before.

‘I can't believe I'm meeting you in person!’ Claudia said. She turned to Eva who stood a little behind Taki, hands still behind her back, gaze still fixed on the foreigner. ‘Now you and your brother have to be on your best behaviour!’

‘Eva's already compared him to Arnold van Reagan,’ Klaus said, voice full of mischief.

Claudia looked so mortified that Taki felt the need to reassure her. He didn’t get the chance. At that moment, Heinrich raced back into the hallway and came to a stop by his mother's legs, trying to come to terms with the novelty and excitement of having not one but two guests in his house.

‘They have a secret language, Mama!’ he informed her breathlessly.

Claudia relaxed and chuckled. She beckoned them all towards the living room.

‘Do they, now?’

* * *

The cottage was exactly how Taki had envisioned it. Bare brick walls with charming wooden rafters crisscrossing the ceiling. Taki thought he glimpsed a little of Claudia’s good taste in the rug and lace curtains.

There was a small brown television set in the corner with immense antennae and dusty bronze dials. A radio and a framed picture were perched on the small round table next to it. Taki thought he recognised, from a distance, a young Klaus sitting beside his parents.

Claudia, meanwhile, expertly deflected Klaus’ questions about her health.

‘It’s not much different to what I had growing up. You remember how it was,’ she said vaguely, gesturing for them to sit. ‘It's the same thing in my spine, only now the doctors have a long, complicated name for it. Never mind that now, you must be hungry. I wasn't sure when you'd be getting here so –‘

‘What do they say?’ Klaus insisted, his smile gone again. ‘The doctors?’

Taki saw how this made Heinrich, who hovered near the wheelchair, suddenly fall silent. Klaus didn’t seem to notice. Nor did he notice that Eva’s eyes were anxiously darting between her mother and uncle.

‘Klaus,’ Taki said hesitantly.

 _Not in front of them,_ he wanted to say, but it didn't seem like his place.

Claudia heard him and glanced round at Eva and Heinrich. She gave Taki a small, grateful smile before reaching out to fix Heinrich’s hair.

‘Why don't you both show our new guest the rose garden?’

‘Awww, but it's boring!’ Heinrich pouted.

‘No, it _isn’t_ ,’ said Eva quaintly, throwing her brother a withering look.

Her bashfulness suddenly gone, she took Taki’s hand and pulled him towards the kitchen. Klaus managed another small smile as his eyes followed them out. After a little more urging, Claudia managed to get Heinrich to leave her side and accompany his sister.

* * *

When Klaus stepped through the back door a few minutes later, he was pleased to see that not much had changed at the cottage. He made a mental note of a few things he could do over the next day or so. Grass that needed mowing, a few shingles that needed replacing. Rusty hinges on the gate and a fresh coat of paint.

He itched to do something useful with his hands. So he didn’t have to dwell long on what Claudia told him.

He stepped down onto the overgrown grass and walked to the low brick wall surrounding the rose garden. As Claudia promised, the roses were starting to come into bloom, infusing the air with their fragrance. He walked past the wall, following the sound of Eva’s voice.

He came upon the two of them sitting on the wooden bench Klaus had once helped his father build a lifetime ago. Eva's legs were crossed at the ankles, hands in her lap, and her mouth going a mile a minute. Taki listened with a half-smile.

Klaus grinned. It appeared his niece had found a great sounding board; there wasn't a quieter one this side of the east. He stopped for a few moments to listen to the monologue about horticulture.

They both turned when he approached. Taki's eyes searched Klaus in concern.

‘Can you give us a second, Eva?’ Klaus asked.

She smiled again and smoothed her dress before getting up.

‘Certainly, Uncle Klaus.’

He watched as she went off in search of her brother, whom she suspected was up to no good.

‘I don't know where in the world she came from,’ said Klaus, sitting beside Taki. He thought about it. ‘Actually she's a bit like my older brother. Prim and proper. Stickler for the rules. Hope she ends up happier than he is, though. You wound-up types always seem to struggle to be happy.’

Taki stared at the hedges bearing their delicate treasures. Heads of pink, red and white bobbed in the breeze in various stages of opening.

‘What did Claudia tell you?’ Taki asked.

Klaus sighed and rubbed his face. He needed a shave.

‘She's always had a few issues with her health growing up. But it's never been...’

He paused and swallowed, suddenly reluctant to vocalise it, in case doing so would cement its reality.

‘It could be terminal. Something like a few months.’

Silence.

‘But there’s a chance for recovery. Which is why she’s trying to downplay it.’

Taki was quiet for some time.

‘I'm sorry.’

Klaus heard the hint of a rare emotion in his tone. He looked at him.

‘It means a lot that you're here.’

Taki still watched him carefully. After a brief pause, if only to change the subject, Klaus tried an old campaign.

‘It would mean even more if I didn't have to walk you all the way to that goddamn inn in a few hours. Claudia's not happy about that either, by the way.’

When Taki didn’t reply, he decided to give up for the time being.

A large butterfly flew by, swaying precariously with each small gust of wind, its butter-yellow wings splotched with black. Klaus then looked up as though he'd just remembered where they were.

‘So, here it is,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘Pretty nice, isn't it?’

‘It's lovely,’ Taki said sincerely.

Klaus reached for the nearest hedge where three young roses were beginning to open their petals. He nudged the thorns with his fingertips, by now used to them as much as the petals.

‘The old Wolfstadt curse. The scent of the rose.’ He turned to Taki. _And the king of roses himself sitting in their midst._

‘How does the rose harvest work?’ Taki wanted to know.

Klaus had no idea why such a simple, unassuming question should fill him with so much happiness.

* * *

Balancing ice tea on a tray in her lap, Claudia rolled carefully down the ramp leading from the back door that Wilhelm had built for her. She pushed with a little difficulty through the overgrown grass and past the low brick wall. At first she wondered if she ought to try standing and walking but her lower back had been sending a few warning signals that day. Best not to push it.

In the garden, the wheels were muffled by fresh leaves which were soft and yielding. She came around the corner, saw them standing by one of the hedges, and a little gasp escaped her.

Blushing, she wheeled backwards out of sight. Her pulse was suddenly loud in her ears.

She already knew as much. Klaus had told her in a way that would shock her the least. And she’d had a full year to come to terms with everything it meant.

Still, seeing it with her own eyes was different. Klaus’ arms around Taki’s back. Their lips together. Strangely enough, what had stood out most prominently in her mind was Taki’s hand on her brother’s face.

She almost turned back, partly to give them privacy but mostly out of shock. And, to her embarrassment and dismay, she felt the unpleasant, tinny sensation of having witnessed something illicit. 

And then she remembered the dusty images of the broadcast. A broadcast, she had noted poignantly, that was aired in their country as part of an effort, largely unsuccessful thus far, intended to patch relations between east and west.

She remembered the crackling voices and how Heinrich had bounded to the volume knob and twisted it when he recognised his uncle. How even without colour she could see the vibrancy of the scene. How even through the scratchy sound she could hear the clarity of their vows.

If a bond like that was wrong on any level, she decided, then the world had forgotten how to recognise real beauty.

 _Perhaps you will be the one to find it_ , her grandfather had said, dropping the flower, loose petals and all, into Klaus' palms. Claudia watched, awed and envious. And here they were now.

So, with a new smile, with a sudden desire to let them know they were both safe and loved, she turned the chair back around and tried to make as much noise as possible.

‘I've brought ice tea!’ she announced.

She was both relieved and a little regretful that they stood a nondescript distance apart by the time she rolled into view.

Taki, who was closer to her, hurried to take the tray from her lap. She blushed again, finding those dark eyes entrancing. He crouched low and unburdened her and she thanked him warmly.

She wondered whether she imagined that the smell of roses from the garden had intensified in that moment.

* * *

Not long afterwards, all three were in the rustic little kitchen preparing a late lunch and dessert. Eva, to Klaus’ eternal amusement, was always only a few paces away from Taki’s elbow. Taki in turn would pass her the husks of empty walnut shells to throw into the trash, which she did with all the delicacy of a princess.

A match made in heaven, Klaus thought.

‘I have to remember to keep an eye on her when she gets old enough,’ Klaus remarked after she ran to the bathroom. He grinned at Taki. ‘I'm not about to lose you to another Wolfstadt.’

Even though Claudia laughed easily, Taki’s face flushed. The look he shot Klaus made him feel small.

Klaus lifted eyebrows apologetically and shrugged. _She already knows, right?_

Noticing the tension, Claudia glanced around. She saw Taki’s discomfort and gave Klaus another look that made him quail. She then chose that moment to ask him, somewhat briskly, to bring in the washing.

Feeling a bit like Heinrich, Klaus put the knife down beside half-chopped carrots and slunk out of the kitchen.

When it was just her and Taki in the kitchen, Claudia wondered for a time whether she ought to say anything at all. She thought about his kindness in the living room when Klaus had unthinkingly asked about her condition in front of the children. So she broached the topic gently.

‘He can be a bull in a china shop, can't he?’

Taki turned to look at her where she sat at the kitchen table, mixing icing in a bowl.

‘He’s always been that way,’ she said, with a smile that apologised for her little brother. ‘Barelling ahead and only turning back around afterwards to look at the consequences. After all these years, you’d think he would have learned a thing or two.’

Despite Claudia’s kind eyes, despite the gentle flapping of the lace curtain in the window, Taki was forcibly reminded of a conversation he once had with Hans. Where Hans divulged a past he shared with Klaus and Taki had hung onto every word.

‘But you know –’ Claudia paused in her stirring. ‘There is something different about him.’ She tried to find the words. ‘I can't really explain it, but I've always had this sense that he was searching for something. In a way that reminded me a lot of our mother. Ever since he was a boy. And I can't tell if he's found it yet, but he seems like he's close.’

 _And I hope it's you_ , she thought.

Taki wondered how he ought to respond. Claudia looked up at him, a little abashed.

‘Listen to me, I sound like a batty old aunt with her crazy theories.’

‘Not at all,’ Taki said.

Claudia smiled at him for a while longer and then, a little emboldened by Taki’s response, she continued.

‘It can't have been easy for you. Over the past few years, with the pressure of the war. And at such a young age, too. It's astounding.’

She reflected on the fact that he was a staggering eleven years younger than she was. A small silence fell in the kitchen. Then Claudia gave a little roll of her eyes.

‘And on top of all that, having to keep him on a leash. I hope he didn't make it too hard for you.’

She meant it as a joke but Taki seemed to be mulling her words over. He stood with one hand still on the counter, his hair slightly silhouetted in the glare from the window.

‘He –’ Taki began. ‘I couldn't have done any of it without him.’

When he next looked at her, his eyes carried a depth of feeling she didn’t expect.

Again trying to fight back memories of Hans while at the same time wondering how much of it in fact owed to Hans, Taki found that he was able, perhaps even eager, to speak freely. Something about Claudia made it seem like the most natural course of action.

‘Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to keep fighting like I did. And he’s the reason –’

Taki suddenly thought back to Klaus' casual assertion, weeks ago, that by rescuing Taki he had singlehandedly prevented the global spread of fascism.

 _I mean, I should probably share the credit with the other three. I forget their names. Plus Haruki,_ Klaus had said carelessly. _But I get the lion’s share, wouldn’t you say?_

Though Taki had held back that day, now, standing in a small sunny kitchen in the west with Claudia, he found himself smiling at the memory.

‘Without exaggerating too much,’ he continued softly. ‘I think he's even the reason why the world is better off.’

Claudia only just had time to absorb Taki's dazzling little smile before it was gone again. She waited, sensing that Taki wasn’t quite finished.

‘And – and he's the reason I'm still here at all.’

_And I'm starting to wonder, more and more, whether I ever really deserved it. But I'm trying. To be more deserving._

Claudia waited for another second or two, sensing that she had somehow glimpsed a side of the commander that not many others had seen.

‘That’s one thing I can say in his favour,’ she said at length. ‘Once Klaus knows what he loves, there’s no force in the world that will stop him from pursuing it. Not even a world war,' she added.

There it was again. The word that sent the same wave of anxiety and inadequacy through Taki each time he heard it, no matter what the context. _Liebe_. So similar and so different to _aishiteru_. And neither of which Taki had really been able to face.

‘I haven’t known you very long,’ Claudia continued, gently putting aside the bowl of icing mix. ‘But I can already tell that Klaus was right to have chosen you for his love. And his loyalty.’

It was like a question, one that he hadn’t dared to even ask himself over the years, had been pulled out and answered for him. By someone who knew and loved Klaus as much as he did.

They were both shocked when, just for a moment, Taki's eyes misted over.

He managed to control himself in the nick of time and hoped Claudia hadn’t noticed, just like Klaus hadn't noticed when they sat beneath the wisteria.

She had.

She rolled to him and, slowly and gingerly, got to her feet. This had the effect of startling Taki enough that tears were no longer a concern. He took her hand and helped her up.

* * *

Klaus had been planning to make a gruff, witty announcement of some kind when he came through the door. He was glad that he happened to look through the kitchen window first.

He didn’t know what to make of how his sister embraced Taki. How she raised a hand to wipe her eyes even though she was still smiling. He stood there, holding a large washing basket full of fresh-smelling linen, and for a serious moment wondered whether he had in fact dreamt up the whole day.

‘Uncle Klaus!’

Heinrich came zooming around the corner. Gone was the paper hat and the wooden sword. He now sported a bright red model airplane.

‘Uncle Klaus! Want to know my call sign?’

Klaus took one last look through the window. And then he looked down to watch the little red plane making circles around him. He tried to remember what Heinrich had asked him.

‘Of course I do,’ he said.

‘It’s _Wolverine_ _!’_

Klaus laughed.

‘Wolverine, huh?’

‘Yep!’ he said, voice full of pride.

‘Suits you perfectly.’

After the washing basket was hoisted up a little higher, Lycanthrope and Wolverine headed up the back stairs, one of them ceaselessly orbiting the other.


	23. The People's Victory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, and the next which isn’t far behind, are both dedicated to my favourite Italian, Hanairoh, who managed to read my last update and leave an amazing review even while bedridden and in severe pain! :( Please get better soon! And PS thank you for your take on Taki's name - you'll see a bit of that below. Klaus agrees with you :)

After they had lunch, Claudia divided up the carrot and walnut cake, which Klaus declared was the best he’d ever had. Then, to Taki’s chagrin, the topic of sleeping arrangements resurfaced.

The cottage, having only ever served as a summer home to the Wolfstadts, only contained two bedrooms. Claudia had the master and the children shared the smaller. When Klaus wrote to tell Claudia he would be coming, she had apologised in her reply for having to put him up on the couch.

_And I’ll pray you haven’t gotten any taller or we'll have to bring out the ironing board for your feet._

Taki had already assumed as much, which was why he had asked Hasebe to organise alternative accommodation for him.

With Claudia as reinforcement, Klaus tried to make him see reason.

‘The war ended technically. On paper. Not in the minds of a lot of these people. They still –’

‘Did you fly another plane during the war, Uncle Klaus?’ Heinrich piped up suddenly from beside him, white icing smeared around his mouth and a small dollop even hanging from his fringe. His legs swung back and forth below the dining table.

Taki was grateful for the momentary distraction. Klaus’ eyes softened.

‘I sure did.’

‘How many? Hundreds?’

Klaus chuckled and wiped some of the icing off Heinrich’s face with a napkin.

‘Just the one.’

‘Did you kill all the bad guys?’

‘That’s enough, Heinrich,’ said Claudia, a little worried about Klaus’ reaction. She remembered only too well how much he had suffered after he had flown in the first war.

‘It’s alright,’ he assured her with a small smile. To Heinrich, he said, ‘I didn’t that time, buddy. The bad guys nearly got _me_ , though.’

‘They did?’

It was a little jarring for Heinrich to envision such a thing happening to his invincible uncle.

For a moment, Taki recalled the relief that flooded him months ago when he returned to his bedroom, wanting only to sleep, and was greeted by the sight of Klaus sitting in the chair by the window. The scotch he held in his hand. The story of what happened to the _Arai_.

‘They got one of my engines.’ Klaus picked up the model airplane, which had remained beside Heinrich’s plate throughout lunch despite Claudia’s earlier reprimand. He pointed at an invisible left propeller. ‘This one over here. And then I went like this through the air.’

The plane swayed a little from side to side. Sitting across the table from him, Taki found himself watching the plane’s slow descent.

‘And then landed as soft as a butterfly –’ The plane touched down between the bowl of begonias and jug of orange juice. ‘– right between the trees.’

Heinrich’s mouth had fallen open.

‘Was it scary?’

‘Nah. You kidding?’

It was a wise lie. Heinrich's face brightened, the image of his uncle the hero restored, and he picked up his half-eaten slice of cake with both hands.

Klaus met Taki’s eye for a brief, poignant moment. He then changed gears swiftly.

‘The war’s not over according to these people,’ he reiterated. ‘And it won’t be for a long time. Not to mention the fact that a few of them might recognise who you are, even out here. Staying in town alone is a bad idea, Taki.’

Klaus had already considered staying with him. As much as he hated the idea of coming all the way there just to leave Claudia alone at night, he secretly intended to fall back on that plan if cajoling failed.

And so various permutations were suggested by both Klaus and Claudia, with a serene, helpful interjection every now and then from Eva. Each suggestion had its own flaw.

First was the idea that the kids would share the master bedroom with Claudia and leave the twin beds free in the smaller room. But Claudia quietly admitted, while the kids were fetching dessert utensils, that her pain was greatest during the night and she didn’t want them to see that.

She wouldn’t hear of Klaus sleeping on the floor.

Klaus then suggested he share the bed with Claudia and leave the couch for Taki.

‘I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, little brother, but I can’t handle snorers,’ Claudia replied. ‘With Wilhelm out of the house, I can at least get a few hours of decent sleep between my flare-ups.’

‘I don't snore. Do I?’

Taki kept his gaze studiously trained elsewhere.

‘Mama can sleep on the couch,’ Eva said, trying to come up with an arrangement the adults may have missed. ‘And then Taki and Uncle Klaus can have Mama’s bed.’

It was an option the others had tried to avoid mentioning for Taki’s sake. Taki caught Klaus’ eye before looking away again.

Claudia’s enlightenment didn’t matter. Taki thought about Eva’s trusting gaze. Her brother’s wide grin. Even if the concept was something they couldn’t understand, he shuddered at the thought of their finding out. No matter how careful Taki and Klaus might try to be, and no matter how many reins Klaus would undoubtedly promise to put on himself, Taki didn’t trust him. He barely trusted himself.

Quick off the mark, Claudia glanced between the two of them before explaining to Eva that the couch would be bad for her back.

And so it appeared they had run out of ideas.

Even though he turned to answer Heinrich’s various questions about what it was like inside a cockpit, it was clear to Taki and Claudia that Klaus was sulking again. Taki regretted this small, unnecessary qualm he had brought to their home. Claudia, meanwhile, was coming up with a little plan.

* * *

Taki had no reason to be suspicious when a battered, ancient pick-up truck pulled up outside the house. An affable man in his fifties came through the door with his young son in tow.

Klaus and the older man slapped one another noisily on the back as they embraced. He was barrel-chested and his huge forearms were heavy with dark hair. Small, clear eyes peered a little myopically from beneath a broad forehead.

Claudia introduced them to Taki as their neighbours, Verner and Rudi.

‘Taki?’ Verner sounded out with interest as he shook his hand.

A few pulses went up, including Klaus’. He’d known Verner ever since he was a little boy. And yet there was no telling whether –

‘Well,’ the man said, scratching under his wool cap. ‘Long way from home, ain’t you? How’s the food here? Must be different to what you’re used to, eh?’

Taki struggled to keep up with the strange new accent, which Klaus later explained was unique to those born and raised in that part of the country, but he was relieved nevertheless.

‘Verner and Rudi have been gracious enough to help out with a few things around the house,’ Claudia explained as they carried heavy boxes of tools and planks through the hallway.

‘Anything for a good neighbour,’ Verner intoned. ‘Plus,’ he told Klaus in a mock undertone over his shoulder. ‘I’m trying to move in on the madam while the master’s away. Don’t tell my wife.’

‘I’ll kill you if you try,’ Klaus replied with a grin.

‘Oh, be quiet, both of you,’ Claudia chided.

Rudi, a very tall, lanky, tanned boy of about fourteen or fifteen, looked Taki once over before turning a light shade of pink and disappearing down the hallway after his father.

Klaus, who picked up on it, knew it was just a benign form of xenophobia, given that Taki was most likely the very first foreigner young Rudi had ever seen. But he found it more amusing to extrapolate.

_Get in line, pal. There’s me and Eva before you._

‘And they’ve agreed to lend Klaus the truck so he can pick up some things from town,’ Claudia continued. ‘You should go along with him, Taki. See a few of the sights before the sun goes down.’

‘But shouldn't someone stay with you?’ Taki tried, expecting Klaus to back him up.

‘She can handle herself for an afternoon, can’t you, Claud?’ Klaus said breezily, which in hindsight Taki realised he should also have picked up as a clue.

‘Absolutely!’

* * *

The clutch made a noise like the grinding of rusty metal and, through the silver of glass that remained in the side-view mirror, Taki saw a brown cloud of exhaust leaking rheumatically from the tailpipe. But he took comfort in Klaus’ grin and held on as the pick-up lurched to a start.

‘I learned how to drive for the first time in this thing,’ Klaus told him. ‘Verner taught me how. Must have been, what, fourteen years ago now.’

Taki stared. ‘You would have been twelve.’

‘Good, I did the math right.’

Once they arrived in town, which was just a small network of squat little shop fronts, Taki drew stares wherever he went. They didn’t stay in any one shop for long enough to identify whether the attention was harmless or otherwise. An hour later, they pulled out of town and chugged back along the dirt road, the back of the truck filled with groceries and hardware supplies.

They were again rolling along at a speed that Taki wasn’t sure the old truck could handle. Eventually, though, they were slowed down by a smaller truck ahead of them, its tray containing a single broad pot plant with spiky green leaves dancing and shivering like a live creature with every bump.

Klaus then checked his watch and grumbled under his breath.

‘Are we late for something?’ Taki asked, thinking about Claudia.

‘No,’ Klaus said almost to himself. ‘The opposite.’

Taki was about to ask him what he meant when Klaus’ face lit up with an idea. He stopped the truck abruptly in the middle of the road before twisting around in his seat to see out the back window. He threw one hand on the seat behind Taki’s head and the truck backed up quickly.

Taki realised he had stared a little too long at the taut muscles of Klaus’ neck. The bulge of his Adam’s apple. He quickly turned to look at the little truck ahead of them, now far in the distance, carrying away its jostling pot plant.

‘I want to show you something,’ Klaus said as they turned left onto a path that led into the trees.

Having heard those words earlier that day, Taki glanced up nervously. Klaus saw the look on his face and laughed.

‘Don’t worry. I actually mean it this time.’

* * *

‘We used to come out here a lot, especially on hot days.’

The trees started off the same, uniform dark green that Taki had seen from the road. As they headed further into the forest, the foliage gradually started become more diverse. Though they were nowhere near autumn, leaves of dark brown and orange started appearing, with occasional lime-green ripples of canopy here and there. There were even tall, slender trees with leaves so bright the green spilled into yellow.

After a while, the land dipped and they turned into a wide clearing bordered by a small river. Taki heard a faint roaring in the distance.

Klaus sprang from the truck.

‘It’s a popular little attraction,’ he said. The door gave a creak before he slammed it closed. ‘As popular as things get around here, anyway. Claudia told me to show you the sights, after all.’

The sound of roaring got louder as Taki stepped onto the pleasant, springy earth. As they took a few paces towards the water the source of the noise became visible.

Around the bend was a small, beautiful waterfall, gushing whitely into the mouth of the river.

There was a picnic table on the grassy bank just near the water occupied by a small family of three. They were gathering up the remains of their lunch and placing them into the wicker baskets at the front of their bicycles. Their bells rang merrily as they passed Klaus and Taki.

Hands on hips, Klaus stood near the bank and inhaled. Taki went to stand beside him. The bright colours of the trees created mottled reflections in the water by the opposite shore.

Taki thought of the river he fell into as a child. Salt water and rushes of sound. Perhaps, he mused, if he hadn’t been washed up early, he could have been swept all the way here.

‘Taki means waterfall, doesn't it?’ Klaus said unexpectedly.

Taki looked at him.

‘It does.’

Their eyes followed the water tumbling over the rocky cliff face, cold and ruthless and striking.

‘Suits you,’ Klaus observed. ‘Better than mine suits me anyway.’

Taki thought of the conversation he had continued with Claudia earlier that day where, brushing new tears aside, she asked what he had meant about the world being better off thanks to Klaus. By then, they could hear Klaus and Heinrich’s voices outside the kitchen window so Taki tried to explain the downfall of fascism in a nutshell; how Mussolin may never have been forced to step down if Taki hadn’t been rescued.

‘Klaus always said he wanted to win the war for me,’ Taki told her. ‘Somehow, he managed to do one better.’

(Right after that, Klaus had entered the kitchen holding a large basket of linen with few pegs in the corner of his mouth; a sight that swiftly discredited Taki’s grandiose words and made Claudia chuckle.)

Standing by the river, Taki almost smiled again.

‘ _The people’s victory_ suits you quite well,’ he said without thinking.

Klaus was surprised.

‘How do you know what it means?’

Taki felt a small flush creep up his neck. He remembered how his eye had fallen on a book of name derivations in the library at Luckenwalde. He found himself guiltily pulling it off the shelf and turning to the letter ‘K’. That had taken place only a few short weeks after he’d met Klaus.

‘I – happened to come across it,’ he said falteringly. ‘In my studies.’

Though Klaus narrowed his eyes, he decided not to press it.

* * *

The longer he watched Taki take in the scene, the more Klaus was willing to accept that it was really happening. That Taki was there with him. The way he gazed across the water, it almost seemed as though he was watching Klaus and Claudia splashing about near the foot of the waterfall, their father calling out in case they ventured too close to the rocks.

After casting a quick glance around the clearing and the narrow path they’d taken through the trees, Klaus stepped behind Taki and pulled him close, his arms snug about Taki’s waist. Klaus breathed in the smell of his hair and pressed his right cheek against Taki's left.

Taki’s first instinct was to resist. To make sure no one had seen. To protest in some way. But something about Klaus’ warmth had managed to counter the guilty memory of Luckenwalde.

And so, after a few seconds, he rested his head back against Klaus’ shoulder.

The wind riffled through their hair. The water poured endlessly. In the sky, a single sparrow courted a single cloud.

‘I like it here,’ said Taki, his voice barely audible over the fall.

Klaus couldn't be sure if Taki meant there, at that moment, or in the country. Either way, he was surprised and grateful.

‘I like _you_ here. You've become a regular waterfall of words.’

It wasn’t a smile – more like a twitch of his lips and his eyes lowering self-consciously – but Klaus savoured it anyway.

‘I’m glad,’ he added, his voice softening. He thought back to a conversation they had in a place miles from there. Wisteria and a glinting silver-blue headdress.

‘Have you thought about what we talked about that day?’ he asked. ‘About the gods keeping score?’

He turned his face and buried his nose in the place on Taki’s neck where his scent was strongest.

‘Because they would have added quite a few more notches since,’ he murmured.

Taki felt another flush of embarrassment. They had spent a great deal of the past few weeks, whenever Taki wasn’t needed to oversee wind-down duties, holed up in Taki’s bedroom or in Klaus’ shed.

_It’s like they’ve looked out for us this whole time. Looked out for you. Like they’ve forgiven you._

Taki lifted his hands, which until then had been inert, and moved them along Klaus’ forearms, resting them at the crook of his elbows.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But… I hope you’re right.’

Klaus lifted his eyebrows. His words were never a waterfall, he thought. But they managed to have the same effect anyway.

* * *

He nudged Taki’s head gently until Taki turned to face him. Their kiss was soft and unprovocative. But Klaus felt tingles on his arms along where Taki had just drawn his fingers. He pulled back and stared for a moment.

‘Want to go for a swim?’ he asked suddenly, trying to channel his desire into something less obscene.

Taki was startled.

‘Now?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

‘I… we don’t have a change of clothes.’

‘We’ll just strip. Or swim in the clothes we have. Whatever.’

‘No, I –’

But Klaus unexpectedly tightened his hold around Taki and lifted. Taki’s feet left the ground by a few inches and his stomach lurched.

_‘Klaus!’_

‘You’ll enjoy it, I promise.’

He walked them towards the water while Taki tried to break free. Klaus’ arms were suddenly like a steel vice.

‘Klaus, _don’t!_ Let go!’

Taki tried to push away, to plant his feet on the ground, to squirm out of his grasp. And still Klaus didn’t relent. His mind was a few seconds in the future when Taki’s shirt was sticking to his body and his eyes were glinting angrily at Klaus through wet hair.

The water approached threateningly. Taki suddenly imagined returning to the cottage sopping wet. The look on Claudia’s face. The children’s questions.

‘You’ll thank me later,’ Klaus said, the blood rushing to his cock at the thought, ‘when we’re both drenched and pressed up against the – _hey!_ ’

Taki’s feet had suddenly found the floor. He bent backwards, shifting both of their centres of gravity. And then, with a move that he had practiced so many times it required almost no thought, he hooked a leg around Klaus’ and pushed him back with a sharp, lethal nudge of his elbow in Klaus’ solar plexus. Klaus felt the blow, lost his balance and fell hard on his back. He laughed the whole way down.

* * *

He kept laughing even as Taki stood over him, breathing a little heavily, slightly shocked at himself. Klaus’ laughter echoed in the clearing, bouncing off trees and water. He lifted a hand to his chest where Taki had dug in his elbow.

‘There’s my alley cat,’ he said, his eyes simmering.

‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ said Taki, sounding dazed. Unsure of what else to do or say, he offered Klaus a hand. He saw the look in Klaus’ eye a moment too late.

Klaus reached past Taki’s hand and pulled his forearm hard, bringing his whole body down on top of Klaus’. One hand on his lower back. The other clutching the back of his head. And their mouths pressing together hard enough to hurt.

Taki, his grunt of surprise effectively muffled, was held fast against Klaus’ invading tongue. There was the unmistakable feeling of Klaus’ cock hardening beneath his thigh.

He only had the chance to catch his breath when Klaus released his hair to hold his jaw in a tight grip and drag his thumb roughly along his lip.

‘It’s been three days since I fucked you in that field,’ Klaus complained. The sudden hoarseness of his voice sent a familiar thrill down Taki’s spine. ‘I’m hungry.’

And then his mouth was back, his body rose beneath Taki and he was flipped onto his back, Klaus’ weight pressing on him and into him. Klaus ground his cock against Taki’s through their clothes and pushed a moan from his throat. Taki’s hands were held down on either side of his face. Klaus grinned at him as if to let him know that none of his tricks were of any use now.

Taki was torn between two images. The first was his fleeting glimpse of the muscles of Klaus’ neck as he craned his head to reverse the truck. The second was the little family that had left only minutes ago. There was a strong chance that at any moment –

A screech of laughter and hard footfalls sounded from nearby, drawing closer through the trees at an alarming rate.

Klaus froze on top of him. He barely had time to groan in frustration, feeling distinctly as though he was being punished for his boldness, before he rolled away.

Breathing hard, Taki was about to scramble to his feet when Klaus, who lay on his back an innocent distance away, put a steady hand on his arm.

‘Relax.’

Taki glanced at him, at his wide mouth panting slightly, lips curved with a hint of both frustration and humour, his eyes still smouldering, and tried to settle back.

The youngsters came into view not long afterwards. A boy and a girl of about sixteen; he was tall and thin, she short and curvy, both mousy-haired. Once they made it down the slope, the boy pulled her to him and kissed her. Klaus was reminded of the night he’d stolen to the river with Greta Scholz.

They noticed Klaus and Taki a few seconds later. Klaus was gratified to see how the boy’s face fell when he realised they weren’t alone.

 _The feeling’s mutual,_ Klaus sent him spitefully.

He was nevertheless envious of the way they were still able to link hands and head for the bank a little further upriver. They sat together, his arm around her shoulders.

Taki felt his pulse slowly return to normal.

The river rolled by them, its gentle sound muted by the loudness of the fall.

Klaus, meanwhile, found he was unable to pull his eyes away from the young couple. How she would lean in towards him, her laugh still audible even from that distance, and plant little kisses on his cheek. How he would occasionally lift the arm around her shoulders to brush her hair back from her neck.

He couldn’t understand his sudden feelings. The sudden sharpness. He turned away eventually, aware it would seem strange if they caught him looking.

When he closed his eyes, the sun still traced their shapes into his eyelids. His arm around her. Her lips on him. So easy. So casual. Where he had to fight for every touch. Where he was constantly looking over his shoulder. Even here, so far from the land where things like honour and duty had gotten in the way. Even here, where Taki was closer than he had ever been, within arm’s reach, he was still –

 _It’s been a day_ , he reminded himself. He took a slow inhale and tried to turn up the volume of that rational voice in his head.

 _It’s been a day. A day since you got off the train. Focus on how he said_ I hope you’re right _more than how he said_ I don’t know _. Focus on the fact that he's here at all._

 _And stop... looking for him._ _He’s there, right next to you._

He didn’t know that Taki was watching him closely.

* * *

By the time they arrived at the cottage, it was already approaching evening. They got out of the truck to see Claudia, Verner and Rudi having a pot of tea on the front porch.

‘All done?’ Klaus asked as they climbed the porch steps.

‘All done,’ Claudia replied.

Eva appeared in the doorway, her usually composed face filled with excitement. She took Taki’s hand immediately.

‘You have to come see!’ she insisted.

Taki barely had time to register Klaus’ mysterious grin before Eva pulled him down the hallway past both bedrooms. She opened a third door at the end of the passage with a flourish and stepped aside.

It was a small room with floorboards still bare and only a small slit of a window. But there was a narrow, metal-framed bed with a warm turquoise duvet, a side table and lamp. And Taki’s suitcase at the foot of the bed.

‘How –?’

‘Used to be the boiler room,’ said Verner, who, despite his size, had come up behind Taki without his having noticed and made him jump. Verner scratched the back of his neck, looking pleased. ‘Great big ancient thing. Before electricity, see?’

‘During the Industrial Age,’ Eva interjected, nose in the air. ‘Papa said so.’

‘Yeah, that,’ said Verner doubtfully. ‘Anyway, it was sitting here being useless. We had to yank the thing out clean off the floor. So you best be careful, might be splinters in the floor still.’

‘But –’ Taki tried again.

‘Always wanted to use it as a silo,’ Verner continued, not even hearing him. ‘So when Claudia said she wanted a third bedroom by tonight, well hey! Fates aligned, innit? Sorry about the bed, though, it’s a creaky old spare. Creaks something fierce.’

Over the next few minutes, when everyone was back in the hallway near the front door, Klaus was standing with his arms crossed and struggling not to roll his eyes. It was apology countering apology. First Taki insisted that he had never intended to be such a burden, followed by Claudia apologising earnestly for the size and bare-bones state of the room especially given what Taki would be used to, followed by Taki trying to apologise to Verner and Rudi for having put them out.

The two of them, meanwhile, were busy loading the boiler-turned-silo into the back of the pick-up and largely avoided the exchange.

‘Look,’ Klaus said finally. ‘You’re not a goddamn burden and we didn’t do it to make you feel guilty. We all just want you here. Okay?’

‘I helped!’ Heinrich declared, again hovering near Claudia. ‘I gave Rudi a hammer when he said to.’

‘And I selected the spare curtains,’ Eva added quickly, unwilling to let Heinrich steal the spotlight.

Klaus smirked. ‘Can’t say no now. It was a family effort.’

Taki’s guilt still ran rampant but he was surrounded on all sides by goodwill and ill-disguised anticipation.

‘I…’ he said, at a loss. His shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘I can’t begin to thank you enough for –’

Klaus sighed with relief. Eva’s grin was even wider than her brother’s.

‘Thank goodness,’ said Claudia. She beamed. ‘Please try to think of it as you doing me a favour. This way, I’ll sleep easy knowing you’re safe from any idiots in town.’

Her smile took effect almost immediately. Taki felt a rush of gratitude.

‘Plus,’ Klaus whispered in Taki’s ear after Claudia took the kids inside to start dinner. ‘Verner said the bed creaks, didn’t he? You’re safe from me, too.’

* * *

All things considered, and despite what he’d said to Taki, Klaus was proud of himself for holding back that first night. Perhaps due to the train journey and their eventful first day, Klaus fell into a deep sleep on the couch without having spent too long torturing himself over thoughts of Taki sleeping alone a few doors away.

The next morning, he awoke covered in a film of sweat. He half-seriously believed it to be a side-effect of his frustrated libido before news reached him later in the day that the entire region was experiencing a spring heatwave.

He sat up, undid the top few buttons of his shirt and got to his feet. The wheat fields were framed prettily by the living room windows which had already been thrown open. The smell of eggs and toast wafted through the house.

Klaus trudged, yawning, into the kitchen.

‘Claudia, you shouldn’t be up so early –’

Taki turned from the stove. Klaus felt a little jolt.

As innocuous as it was, the moment was a little strange for Taki as well. He took in Klaus’ huge form in the doorway, ruffled hair and bare feet, as though seeing him for the first time.

‘I didn’t know you knew how to cook,’ was all Klaus could come up with as he took a seat at the table.

Taki didn't seem fazed.

‘It’s nothing special.’

‘This whole thing is pretty special,’ said Klaus, picking a green apple out of the nearby bowl and taking a large bite. ‘I could get used to playing house with you.’

Taki didn’t reply. Klaus felt a guilty twinge over his own words when he remembered Claudia and the reason they were there in the first place.

‘Are you hungry?’ Taki asked.

Klaus’ eyes travelled over Taki’s slender waist. The curve of his ass. The white skin of his neck and arms.

‘Yes,’ he said, packing as much innuendo as he could into the one syllable.

Taki ignored it, and Klaus’ gaze, as best as he could when he turned with the frying pan in hand. He was relieved when a half-asleep Heinrich, guided more by his sense of smell than that of sight, shuffled into the kitchen and Klaus was forced to behave.

But by that night, Klaus’ patience had run out.

* * *

Taki wasn’t sure if the loud creaks of his bed or Klaus lips on his neck woke him first. He opened his eyes in the dead of night. Then his pulse shot up.

That day, Claudia had struggled with the heat, so Klaus had made her rest while he took care of meals, mowed the lawn, fixed the hinges on the gates and nailed more planks into the gaps. Taki had helped where he could and, as an unintended consequence, Klaus had been plagued all day with various images of a silent, sweating, focused Taki. And, with the children running around, he had no time to even steal a kiss.

‘What are you –?’

‘I can’t wait anymore,’ said Klaus in the gravelly voice that made Taki weak.

‘But –’

With no preamble, Klaus slipped a hand past Taki’s pants and held his cock, which immediately began to stiffen in the warmth of his palm.

Taki arched his back and the old metal bed frame wailed beneath him. Even Klaus winced.

‘They’ll hear,’ Taki said in a breathy whisper. ‘Please…’

The word made Klaus grit his teeth and pause, his hand still on Taki’s cock, which he could feel pulsing slightly in his grip. Taki lay beneath him anxiously and waited.

‘Get on the floor,’ Klaus said, after a moment’s indecision.

‘What?’

Klaus slid to the ground and, ignoring the final loud complaint made by the bed, he pulled Taki with him. In only a few seconds, Taki was pinned under his weight beside the bed. Klaus peeled Taki’s shirt off and palmed his bare chest.

Taki's mind raced. He knew Klaus would stop if he said no. Klaus had made a promise to never again touch his body without his consent, and Taki knew it didn’t matter whether he’d sworn it months ago or the previous day.

But there was something heated and relentless about Klaus that night. It was on the verge of being frightening. At the very least, it frightened Taki to imagine what it would do to Klaus if he were to refuse.

Besides that, Klaus’ hand was already stroking him quick and hard, already coating his cock in his pre-come, and Taki could no longer be sure if he was afraid of Klaus or his own pleasure.

So, instead of protesting, he bit his tongue and turned his head to the side, his eyes squeezed shut.

Klaus felt him surrender. The thrill that rushed through him then was unrivalled. He was about to have Taki on the floor of his own cottage.

He slipped Taki’s pants past his hips, bent down and swallowed his cock. Taki clamped both hands over his mouth.

* * *

He did a commendable job of keeping quiet, Klaus thought, hearing only shallow, staccato breaths from above him as he sucked.

It occurred to him that, while they were used to having to be quiet, it had never been like this. Here, there could be no moaning, no slapping flesh, no name-calling. Just Klaus fucking Taki as deeply and silently as he could.

He stroked himself furiously and transferred some of his pre-come, slicked over his fingers, into Taki’s hole.

There. The smallest of whimpers. Still, nothing that the others wouldn’t mistake for a mouse, Klaus thought. Or an alley cat.

He finally moved his mouth down to Taki’s heat and thrust his tongue in deep, lapping and circling with the gusto of a starved man. Again, only tortured little breaths from above.

And then, with a start, Klaus remembered the only other time they’d had to be perfectly silent; the day that Haruki Yamamoto, at the most inopportune of moments, had knocked on Klaus’ door. Taki had trembled beneath him, his hands over his mouth, just as they were now. Klaus remembered how he had continued to talk to Haruki, his voice strained and hoarse, all while plunging his cock mercilessly into Taki. He remembered how Taki had tried to cope. The bite mark on the inside of Taki’s arm. The way that Suguri had wrapped it gently in a bandage.

And so Klaus straightened. He glanced around, trying to improvise, and picked up his shirt. In a few deft movements, he reached down and wrapped the sleeve around Taki’s mouth, tying it off tightly behind Taki’s head. Only when he was done did he meet Taki’s startled gaze.

‘So you don’t have to bite your arm this time,’ he explained in a whisper. He held down Taki’s hands above his head when he tried to loosen the sleeve.

And suddenly the sight of him like that, hands held down, Klaus' shirt around his mouth, was almost too much.

‘Fuck.’

Taki's eyes flashed above the gag, a mixture of defiance and anxiety. And an unmistakeable glint of something else; something that had to do with how close he had been to coming when Klaus’ mouth was around his cock.

Reaching the end of his tether, Klaus kept Taki’s hands pinned as he lined himself up. When his cock pushed in, there was the smallest of moans, again nothing more than a nocturnal hum, and Taki’s back arched again, his chest cresting up to meet Klaus’.

A few experimental thrusts at first, just to make sure Taki could keep his voice down. To make sure their bodies weren’t making too much noise against one another and against the floor.

And then Klaus drove his cock into him in long, deep thrusts, always just shy of slamming his hips against Taki’s skin. There was no sound from beneath him other than Taki exhaling desperately through Klaus’ sleeve, his eyebrows drawn, eyes closed. Feeling every thrust without being able to express it.

So Klaus spoke for the both of them.

‘Not easy for me either you know,’ he said in fierce, ragged whispers between thrusts. ‘Keeping... my voice down... when you're... this... fucking... tight.’

He then pulled out suddenly and let go of Taki’s hands in order to reach back and push his knees right up against his chest, exposing him to Klaus even more than when his legs were spread. Taki breathed hard against the sleeve, trying not to lose his mind over the way Klaus was staring at his body.

Their eyes locked as Klaus pushed his cock back in fully.

‘Mmmhh!’

The loudest moan so far. Enough to make Klaus pause and Taki’s heart pound in his ears.

The house slept peacefully.

And so Klaus went back to thrusting, pressing Taki’s legs hard into his body, uncomfortably aware of how the sight of Taki in a gag made him rush towards the edge faster than anything ever had.

‘Read to feel me come inside you?’ he growled in Taki’s ear.

Only muffled whimpers. Klaus sped up his thrusts, gripping Taki’s wrists hard enough that he knew it must hurt. One or two noisy slaps rang out in the room.

‘Is that a yes? You’re ready to take it?’

_‘Mmm!’_

‘Here it is! Oh, _fuck_  – _!_ ’

And finally he peaked and shot inside Taki, feeling as though it was the first time he’d done so in years.

He let go of Taki’s hands which immediately latched onto his shoulders. The nails dug in so forcefully that Klaus gasped. He felt Taki shudder through his climax, a few tears leaking onto the sleeve.

* * *

The crickets were louder than we were, Klaus thought almost proudly as he undid the knot behind Taki’s head. They were both still breathing heavily. When the sleeve was gone, Taki wiped his mouth with the back of his aching wrist.

Klaus moved it aside and kissed him.

Still trying to see through the haze of his climax, Taki returned the kiss at first. Then he remembered Claudia and the children sleeping only metres away. He broke away and averted his gaze.

A cold burst of air. It had been a while since Klaus had seen him do that. His heart sank a little.

‘Hey, come on,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be angry.’

Taki tried to sit up and Klaus shifted his weight away to let him.

‘I’m not,' Taki replied.

He could have stopped Klaus at any point, after all, he realised. Until the gag, anyway. And he didn’t.

‘You sound angry.’

‘I’m just… worried. That they heard.’

But the house was as silent as the night.

After Taki pulled his shirt back over his head, he felt Klaus’ fingers run gently down his spine.

‘I’m sorry.’

The sincerity of his voice, which carried even in his whisper, surprised Taki. He turned.

‘I… you have no idea how badly I wanted you,’ he said, his eyes a little anxious in the gloom. ‘But if you didn’t – I mean, if –’

‘It’s okay,’ Taki heard himself say.

Sitting up fully, Klaus touched his face and tried again.

‘I didn’t drag you out here just to be like this. I’ll… I’ll be better from now on.’

‘You didn’t drag me here,’ Taki reminded him.

Klaus gave a small smile. But his eyes retained a little guilt. A little uncertainty.

Taki hesitated.

_I wanted you too. It felt good for me too. Far too good._

All he could do was return Klaus’ kiss.

* * *

_A WEEK LATER_

The heatwave showed no signs of easing. When Klaus and Heinrich met Eva at the bus stop down the road, Eva regaled them with her teacher’s explanations about warm fronts in spring.

‘What kind of teacher explains that to a class of six year olds?’ Klaus asked with Heinrich clinging to his back.

‘She didn’t explain it to the _class_ , I went and asked her myself,’ Eva clarified. She found that she was always clarifying for adults.

‘Right.’

At the cottage, Taki was putting away the dishes while a kettle of water boiled for afternoon tea.

Even though it had been a week, Klaus hadn’t gotten used to the sight of him in the cottage. He stopped for a few moments just to look at him, the rolled sleeves of his light collared shirt, his occasional smile. He watched as Eva’s cheeks flushed when she told Taki about her day. The thought that Taki felt even slightly at home there was a relief Klaus experienced on a daily basis.

‘Where’s Claudia?’ he asked, his head tilting to the right as Heinrich pulled experimentally on his earlobes.

Klaus had kept a close watch on her as she dealt with the heat. She had been napping when Klaus went to pick up Eva.

‘Out back,’ Taki replied. ‘She said she wanted some air.’

Klaus stepped outside into the blazing afternoon with Heinrich still on his back. The smell of roses carried on the warm breeze.

‘Look,’ Heinrich said. ‘Mama’s chair!’

He was pointing to the base of the ramp where Claudia's wheelchair sat empty on the lawn.

For no reason, Klaus felt a small jolt of fear.

‘Claudia?’

He lowered Heinrich to the ground and hurried down the stairs.

She wasn’t in the rose garden. Or in the vegetable patch around the side of the house.

‘Claudia!’

His voice drew Taki from the kitchen, who came out in time to see him striding quickly down the slope of the lawn towards the other side of the rose garden.

There, Klaus saw her frail form standing beneath the washing line, hanging out wet clothes in the glaring sun.

‘For fuck’s…’

‘Klaus!’

She seemed pleasantly surprised to see him. Her smile vanished when he approached and she saw the look in his eye.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘I thought I heard you yelling but I wasn’t sure –’

It was her bad luck that she misstepped at that moment and tripped on the hem of her long dress. From where he was, Klaus could only see it as her spine giving way in the oppressive heat. It didn’t matter that she righted herself before he drew close and even smiled dryly at her clumsiness.

Without stopping to let her protest, Klaus slid an arm behind her knees, picked her up and headed back up the slope towards the house.

‘For _goodness’_ sake, Klaus!’ she exclaimed, unsure whether to be more shocked at his actions or the look on his face. ‘Put me down!’

Taki stood at the top of the slope near the ramp.

‘Bring the wheelchair,’ Klaus told him briskly.

He wasted no time complying. They met in the middle of the lawn.

‘I’m telling you, I’m fine,’ Claudia insisted as Klaus lowered her gently into the seat. ‘You’re overreacting!’

‘There’s no point in my being here if you’re going to kill yourself in your own goddamn backyard.’

There was a strained silence. Claudia had never heard him use a voice like that. Even Taki tensed.

‘Klaus…’ she said quietly.

He still knelt by the wheelchair and the reality of Claudia’s condition rushed him again, like it sometimes did with no warning. Her thin face and newly fragile body. The spine that was letting her down.

Holding her hand just a fraction too tightly, he took a deep, calming breath and hung his head, which suddenly felt heavy, near hers.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Taki's heart gave a single, painful throb.

‘Oh, Klaus,’ said Claudia again in a low murmur. She touched his face.

After a few seconds, she managed a smile when she thought of how easily he had picked her up.

‘When did you get so big, little brother? I remember when you were small enough I could fit you in my bicycle basket.’

Klaus lifted his head. The other two were relieved to see a hint of his familiar grin.

‘That’s a lie.’

Claudia laughed.

‘Maybe so,’ she admitted. ‘But I do remember when you were Heinrich’s age how my friends and I used to dress you up like a girl.’

A short laugh escaped him.

‘Okay, that’s enough,’ he warned.

‘So you do remember?’ she said before turning to Taki. ‘You should have seen him. He didn’t even put up a fight. Happily paraded around in a frilly dress and our mother’s only pair of heels.’

Taki felt a smile break across his face.

Klaus swiftly got to his feet and took the handles of the wheelchair.

‘The heat’s getting to your head,’ he announced.

‘I think he was just happy for all the attention from pretty girls, even back then,’ Claudia continued relentlessly.

And then, entirely unexpectedly, Taki heard himself laugh.

Klaus glanced around in shock.

It wasn’t a laugh so much as a small, sincere chuckle. But it was a sound Klaus had never heard before and it lit up Taki’s entire face.

‘ _That’s_ what it takes to make you laugh?’ he asked, a little stunned. ‘Heck, I’ll wear a dress right now!’

‘You’re not borrowing any of mine,’ Claudia interjected.

They made it halfway up the ramp, Taki’s laugh still echoing in Klaus’ mind, before Claudia remembered the washing.

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Taki offered.

Klaus watched him walking back down the slope for a few moments before he rolled Claudia into the shade.

* * *

‘You're exaggerating.’

‘I'm really not.’

‘That's the _first_ time you've heard him laugh?’

‘The very first.’

‘I've tried telling you your jokes aren't funny.’

Klaus grinned as he wheeled her into her bedroom. The sunlight streamed in as brilliantly as if they were still outside. Leaving the window open, he closed the curtains and switched on the fan. Then he helped Claudia into bed.

‘I don't think he really had much reason to laugh in the last two years. In Luckenwalde, he walked around as if he had the world on his shoulders. And then for the past year I saw that he really did have the world on his shoulders.’

‘The poor thing.’ After a pause: ‘He's remarkable.’

Klaus felt the heat of the afternoon claim him as well. After Claudia settled, he fell heavily onto Wilhelm’s side of the bed with an arm thrown over his forehead. He sweated through his cotton shirt and khaki pants.

‘He is.’

‘All that responsibility. I can't believe it.’ She smiled and turned her cheek onto the pillow to look at Klaus. ‘And I still can't believe he's here. I can't imagine what he left behind just to come here with you.’

Klaus hesitated.

‘He gave up the throne.’

Claudia blinked.

‘What do you mean?’

Klaus tried to explain. It didn’t sound real to him yet, even after a week. When he was done, Claudia’s eyes were wide with shock. And no small amount of guilt.

‘I can’t believe he did that for you,’ she breathed.

‘I…’ Klaus struggled a bit. ‘I can’t be sure it was all for me. He had doubts about it to begin with.’

‘Of course it was for you.’

Klaus was surprised at her certainty. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

‘How wonderful,’ she said, her eyes crinkling warmly. ‘That he should love you so much.’

Klaus faced the ceiling again. The fan droned steadily and brushed his hair away from his eyes.

‘I’m glad you can see it,' he said carefully. 'It’s hard to tell sometimes.’

The words were brushed away by the fan. They raced through the little gaps in the curtain and out the window. Claudia read volumes in them. And in his silence.

‘You’d have to be blind not to see his love,’ she said slowly.

Klaus’ lips curved upwards when he remembered Taki's laugh.

‘It would be nice to hear it, that’s all. Even just once.’

He was coming from a place of pettiness and insecurity. Somewhere he rarely allowed himself to be even when he was alone. So Claudia was grateful that he had let her in.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it’s more important to feel it rather than hear it.’

He closed his eyes.

‘You’re probably right.’

The voices of Heinrich and Eva, who were playing on the lawn, came to them in effervescent little pops of sound.

‘It’s like I’m still trying to find him,’ said Klaus suddenly. It was something he’d barely put in words in his own mind. ‘I’m closer now but he’s always... far away.’

Claudia remembered Klaus turning up late on the doorstep beside the cat over a year ago. Sitting at the table looking like the sun was shining behind his eyes.

 _You look happy as a child,_ she had said.

 _Do I?_  Klaus had asked, looking at her and then back down at the table with a grin that warmed Claudia's heart.

She tried to see that in him now as he lay beside her.

‘Does he make you happy?’ she asked.

‘I –’

And, after a second that was suspended in the air, Klaus turned to her. To his utter astonishment, he realised he had never once thought to ask himself that.

His entire being, from the moment he met Taki under the wisteria as a boy, and then again at Luckenwalde, and when he followed Taki to the east and then to the ends of the Earth, was filled with something else. Something far more urgent and exquisite and all-consuming than mere… happiness.

Claudia waited.

‘He – yes.’

There was a small silence.

‘Of course he does,’ he said.

The memories lined up like a side reel. Everything Taki had said to him through tears in No Man’s Land. Suguri's office. Lying with his head in Taki's lap under the wisteria. The moment he saw Taki step into the compartment on the train. His quiet, sincere voice asking about the rose harvest. His laughter from only minutes ago.

Happiness. Of course it was –

It was… relief. Immense, sweeping relief. And awe. And gratitude. And love. Always love.

Was that the same thing as happiness? If it wasn't, Klaus decided, it was so close that it didn't make a difference.

Claudia stared at him, trying to understand what had just passed through his mind. Why his answer should have come out sounding so strange.

Is it possible, Claudia wondered, that he simply never considered it before?

‘Well, that’s all that matters, little brother,’ she said gently. ‘Prophecies and oaths and duty and loyalty are all grand and wonderful. But in the end, beneath all of that, the only thing that matters is whether he makes you happy.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And how he makes you feel about yourself.’

Klaus felt the prick of a small thorn.

Thorns and roses, after all, Klaus thought vaguely. You can’t have one without the other. He felt it, the thorn, somewhere in his chest. He tried to press around the thorn, in the same way he’d learned to do with his fingers, so that he could feel it without being pierced by it.

But it hurt, suddenly. And he suddenly wanted to change the subject.

‘Is that why you married your charmer of a husband?’ he asked dryly.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact,’ said Claudia, her tone a little crisp. ‘I don’t care that you two disagree about politics. With him –’ Her eyes softened at the thought of Wilhelm. ‘I never once doubted I was loved.’

Klaus was silent for some time.

‘I bet he’s just good in bed.’

She tutted and slapped his arm.

‘Don’t be crass.’

Klaus chuckled.

Half an hour later, wondering where they were, Taki nervously edged the bedroom door open. They lay side by side, sound asleep. The curtain in the window swayed back and forth, buffeted by the words that had been softly spoken earlier.


	24. Someone Who Deserves Your Light

When Klaus was seconds away from coming, he pulled Taki’s hips towards him, thrusting only once, deeply, before twisting Taki’s body so his right leg was in the air, hooked over Klaus’ shoulder. The shift in position gave him a little respite. So he could last longer. He wanted to last much longer.

He wanted to fuck Taki’s white, naked body sprawled in the sun for as long as humanly possible.

‘Ah… _ugh!_ Klaus!’

‘About to come again?’

‘Nngh!’

‘Say it.’

As he kept pounding, he leaned over Taki’s body to grip his chin in his hand. He pulled Taki’s face towards him so he couldn’t look away. So Klaus could see the impact of each thrust in Taki’s eyes.

‘Tell me you’re about to come.’

Taki took in the sight of his own leg thrown over Klaus’ hard chest and shoulder. The rock-hard muscles of the arm that had reached down to clutch Taki's face. And the cock that had invaded his body over and over again in sweet, unrelenting, agonising thrusts for the past twenty minutes without pause. And suddenly he was driven right to the edge.

‘I’m... I’m –’

He threw his head back and came, his long moan carrying across the clearing.

When he fell silent, they heard once again the ponderous bubbling of the little creek nearby as it fell from rocky step to step.

Klaus stopped thrusting just to savour the full impact of the muscles that clamped down on his cock. He felt the waves of Taki’s pleasure ripple through them both.

No point holding back now, he thought with a grin. He leaned down and kissed Taki at the same moment that he raised his hips off the floor, Taki's right leg still thrown over Klaus’ left shoulder, and started hammering with new vigour.

From that new angle, the bullet wound above Taki’s left hip was suddenly crushed into the hard ground. Taki pulled away from the kiss with a gasp.

‘Ah! Klaus! My –’

_My injury. The bullet wound._

It sounded jarring in his head. Pitiful. Dramatic.

‘Hurts,’ he managed in a constricted voice, but Klaus, his head buried in Taki’s neck, couldn’t hear him. And both of Taki’s hands were again pinned on the ground.

The only sound that could stop Klaus then, the only word for which he kept his ears tuned, was ‘no’. Short of that, Taki’s body was his.

The proof was in the way that his cock drove into flesh that both parted for him, welcoming him in, while also clinging almost lovingly to him as he drew back out. The proof was in the way Taki would arch his back and moan, his eyes gone and his mouth slack.

With one final thrust, Klaus grit his teeth and came, spilling hotly inside Taki. He still held Taki firmly against the grass.

Then he finally heard it.

‘Klaus, my hip,’ Taki said, his voice stiff, his eyes pleading.

He pulled out at once and let go of Taki’s hands.

‘Shit. Sorry. Are you –?’

Gasping, his face contorted in pain, Taki lifted his torso and turned his body so his left hip was off the ground.

Klaus watched as the movement forced his own semen to leak out of Taki's ass, over his cheeks and onto the grass. He swallowed a flare of lust and guilt as Taki held his hip with both hands. He moved to Taki’s side.

‘Let me see.’

He parted Taki’s fingers. The wound was red and sore with angry chafe marks. But there was no bleeding or bruising.

‘It looks okay.’

Taki braced backwards on his arm and Klaus’ words seem to take effect. The throbbing edged away like a receding tide. Klaus heard him settle.

‘I'm sorry, I didn’t realise –’

‘It's okay. I'm okay now.’

Klaus sighed with relief. He wondered how many more things he could do during sex that would call for an apology immediately after the fact.

‘We can go back if you like. Get someone in town to look at it. There aren't any doctors there but –’

‘I'm fine,’ Taki repeated.

After he found his breath again, he sat up and reached for his clothes. Klaus' eyes roved across his small, strong frame for a few moments. Then he kissed Taki's outstretched arm and neck.

‘Let's not go yet,’ he implored. ‘There's nothing to rush back to.’

He took Taki’s shirt from his hand and bundled it up with his own before putting it on the ground for Taki as a pillow.

‘Lie back for a bit. When was the last time you just lay around in the sun?’

Taki looked at him blankly.

‘So never, huh?’

‘Someone might come.’

‘They'd have to be trying really hard. It took us long enough and that was with my mother’s map.’

After a few seconds, Taki reluctantly lay back.

Klaus, who was still on Taki’s left, stretched out perpendicular to him and rested his head on Taki's stomach above his hip. He turned his head to kiss the skin above his wound.

‘Does this hurt? Am I too heavy?’

‘No.’

His body was bronze in the sun, Taki thought.

Lying on his back, Klaus turned his head the other way so his left cheek lay flat on Taki's stomach. From that angle he could only see the underside of Taki’s chin. A hint of lips. He took Taki’s hand and held it to his chest.

‘You're pretty tense for a guy who just came.’

Taki blushed a little.

‘Try to relax,’ Klaus said drowsily. ‘No one's coming. It's just us.’

After a minute or two, Taki removed his hand. Klaus was too sleepy to mind. Then he felt it in his hair. Softly, like Taki was worried Klaus would be offended. Taki felt Klaus’ smile against his stomach.

‘You have no idea how good that feels,’ Klaus murmured.

Taki ran his fingers through the low-hanging hair near Klaus' forehead. Felt his warm skin.

After a while, Klaus' breathing was steady and even.

‘Klaus?’

No response.

Taki sat up slightly, careful not to move Klaus's head. In his sudden solitude, he tried to soak it all in. The creek tumbling over mossy steps. The soft grass in which they lay. The circle of trees that that was a dense barrier to the world beyond.

Taki lay back again on his makeshift pillow.

Relax, Klaus had ordered.

He could do that.

* * *

Beatrice von Wolfstadt’s map was one of two reasons they were there.

The other was that Verner had taken Claudia to her scheduled doctor’s appointment in the next town over, a drive that would take about an hour. When Klaus tried to insist that he borrow the truck and take her himself, she explained that they had planned it for a while and that Verner had his own errands to run in town anyway.

‘And I’ve asked Rudi to take care of the kids while I’m gone,’ she added. ‘Which leaves you most of the afternoon to yourselves.’

Klaus looked at her uncertainly.

On the surface, her condition appeared to have fluctuated over the weeks. Good days and bad. She would improve for several days at a time before succumbing to another bad day where she barely made it out of bed, Klaus crouched beside her in concern and Taki trying to occupy the children.

And yet, Taki thought he saw, somewhere in Claudia, a general trend towards betterment. He couldn’t pin it down to any one thing. It was something in her posture and the quality of her skin. The way it seemed to take her less time to do things or move around.

For fear of getting Klaus’ hopes up, he tried to keep his intuition a secret from him, until one day when they saw her napping fitfully on the couch, her mouth trembling a little in sleep and her brow slightly creased.

By then, Klaus and Taki had been in the cottage for a full month.

‘Hey, Taki?’ Klaus had said unexpectedly, his voice soft, eyes on Claudia. ‘Could you, I don’t know… invoke the gods for her? Or something?’

He looked up into Taki’s surprised expression and smiled thinly at himself.

‘I sound like a believer, don’t I? I'm probably just desperate. Probably where religion came from in the first place.’

From esoteric wisdom straight back to real-world concern when he looked at Claudia.

And so Taki, after hesitating for several moments, tried to put his instinct into words.

‘I think she’s doing better,’ he said. ‘It might not look like it. On days like today. But… I think with you here especially, she really has improved.’

Klaus smiled again, eyebrows raised slightly, hearing only Taki’s need to reassure him. And finding a great deal of comfort in that fact alone. He then knelt by Claudia’s side and replaced the cold towel that had slipped off her forehead.

As far as he was concerned, the only good news that had come out of that month was the strong possibility that his and Taki’s visit may not overlap with Wilhelm’s return.

Master Strauss had written with curt apologies for his continued absence (‘He’s never been good at expressing himself,’ Claudia insisted when Klaus made a face at his phrasing) and explained that the factory would be opening for peacetime operations in the next month and they were holding all the labourers back by order of the minister.

Klaus had complained about his negligence while Claudia kept up a strong-willed defence on her husband’s behalf, even though they both knew that Klaus was greatly relieved. In a small way, for Taki’s sake, Claudia was too.

* * *

It was a pleasant surprise for Claudia and Taki to discover that they had become very fond of one another’s company. They would spend hours in the kitchen together, though of course Claudia would do most of the talking, while Klaus worked outside or clomped about on the roof above them replacing shingles.

Despite his penchant for silence, Claudia was pleased to discover a great deal about Taki’s childhood. His family and his sisters. She was even brought to the point of tears when Taki described his memories of his mother, which he had never before discussed with anyone.

Whenever Klaus was out of earshot they would often talk about him.

Taki gathered snapshots of his youth. His energy. The light and laughter he brought into the house whenever he returned from boarding school. His endless, doting love for their mother.

‘Like Heinrich’s,’ Taki observed.

Claudia smiled.

‘I’m not sure I deserve it from Heinrich as much as our mother did from Klaus. I’m not much of an adventurer. Certainly not a hero pilot.’

‘You don’t need to be,’ Taki had said kindly.

From anyone else, the words wouldn’t have meant much. From Taki, Claudia knew they were a compliment of the highest order.

She, in turn, loved to hear Taki’s recounts about Klaus. Things that she wouldn’t have found out about him otherwise. How he approached his battles. His near-frightening boldness and recklessness and, simmering beneath it all, his intelligence, which Taki now suspected was the real reason he had always emerged unscathed.

 _I get the feeling he doesn’t want people knowing how intelligent he really is,_ Hans had said once. _For whatever reason, he prefers to show off his brawn._

‘He’s bright, that’s for sure,’ Claudia said. ‘Not that anyone outside of our family ever saw that. Hard to see past the fact that he’s the size of a tank.’

And for that, she had again thrown Taki a grateful smile.

One day, Claudia returned to her theory about Klaus. About how he was always on the move. Always searching for something.

She had brought it up largely because she hadn’t been able to shake the conversation she’d had with Klaus weeks ago, where he had so quietly and poignantly talked about the distance between him and Taki. Where the question of happiness appeared to have trailed off into something thin and strained. It had troubled her ever since.

And so she tried, in her own benign, diagonal way, to see where Taki was.

She said again how close Klaus seemed to finding it. Whatever it was. She said it with a small smile. She hoped the hint was clear.

But it made Taki look away.

It made him feel like he’d brushed against something small but white-hot. Like Claudia was wrong but he couldn't bring himself to face it.

Claudia noticed his reaction. And a new shade was added to her disquiet.

Klaus’ footsteps sounded on the roof. Unaware of the silence beneath his feet, he started singing to himself. The strong, happy notes contrasted sharply with the metallic dings of his hammer.

* * *

On the morning of the doctor's appointment, Claudia unearthed it from the bottom of a trunk in her bedroom.

'Mother’s map,' she announced as she wheeled into the kitchen. She placed it on the table with a flourish.

The huge, creased, dog-eared paper, brown and yellow with age, inspired a familiar excitement in Klaus. He eagerly came to the table and looked over its lines and contours.

‘She made it herself,’ Klaus explained to Taki. ‘Before any of us were born. It's a map of the area including a secret little spot she claimed to have found that no one else has ever seen.’

‘I've always doubted that it's real,’ said Claudia.

‘Father said she took him there,’ Klaus pointed out.

Taki could sense that it was an old argument.

‘In any case,’ said Claudia. ‘We couldn’t figure out where anything was. Nothing in the map makes sense. Klaus and I tried to crack it for years. Even Emmerich helped when he wasn’t busy studying.’

‘But we gave up when I was what, ten?' said Klaus. 'Time to give it another crack. I bet it’ll take less than five minutes now.’

‘That’s what I thought you’d say. But this is Mother we’re talking about, remember?’

Klaus drew the map towards him.

‘Claudia,’ he said, his tone both airy and serious. ‘I’m a captain who served in two separate armies over the course of two wars and was chosen by a prince in the far east to be his knight.’ Eyes still on the map, he absently took the rulers that Eva had promptly fetched and passed a compass to Taki. ‘Taki was groomed his whole life to be a military leader, served as the commander of an entire armoured division and recently won a world war for his country.’

He then glanced up and looked at Claudia complacently.

‘I think the two of us can handle Mother’s map.’

Half an hour later, neither captain nor commander had made head or tail of it.

Watching them standing at the table, their heads bent together over the map and their faces bearing almost identical looks of concentration, Claudia didn’t even remember to feel smug.

‘All we know is the cottage is here,’ Klaus was saying. ‘And she’s marked her little hideaway here. Which, according to the scale, is about fifteen klicks east somewhere near this river. But the problem is there’s nothing there. No river. Claudia and I went there half a dozen times. It didn’t make sense. We even asked Mother if there was once a river there that dried up, but she refused to give a single clue.’

‘What if the contouring of the topography isn’t accurate?’ Taki suggested. ‘That way, she wouldn’t have factored the distance it would take to cover valleys and inclines.’

‘That’s a thought.’

From across the table where she was mending one of Heinrich’s shirts, Claudia considered their intentness. The way in which they seemed to read each other’s minds as they turned the map, consulted the legend and searched for new angles. The way that neither of them even seemed to be aware of their subtle harmony.

Though Beatrice appeared to confound them even in death, in that moment Claudia saw how much of a formidable match Taki Reizen and Klaus von Wolfstadt would have made in the heat of battle.

‘It’s not to scale,’ Taki said suddenly.

‘What isn’t?’

‘The whole map.’

‘But there’s a scale right here.’

‘It’s a decoy,’ Taki said with a faint smile, taking in the distance of the cottage to the road and then the distant hills. ‘A false scale. The map has no proportion. It’s like it’s been… drawn from memory.’

Klaus stared and blinked. The ruler in his hand suddenly seemed pointless.

‘The sly minx,’ he said. ‘No wonder she was able to make it herself when she was eighteen. It probably took her all of ten minutes. She must have been laughing when she added the scale.’

Claudia put her sewing away and drew up to the table with interest.

‘So the place isn’t fifteen klicks east,’ Taki surmised. ‘It could be anywhere.’

‘No,’ said Klaus, and his eyes flashed with sudden understanding. ‘It’s to the east and it’s near the river. The only river around here.’

‘But that river goes for miles,’ Claudia remarked. ‘We can’t be sure where exactly –’

Klaus pointed at two vertical lines encasing little swirls, which, if the map had been to scale, wouldn’t have made any sense.

‘Ring any bells?’

‘The waterfall,’ Taki realised.

‘It’s near there. Somewhere behind it, looks like.’

A small silence fell in the kitchen.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Claudia finally. ‘You might have actually figured it out.’

‘Even if we're right, who knows if the little trail she drew behind the fall is accurate,’ said Klaus. ‘It might not even go anywhere.’

* * *

It did.

It took them half an hour to arrive at the waterfall on foot. They then began the hike up the incline, the roaring of the water filling their ears, before slipping into the trees at the very top.

There was no path through the undergrowth. All they had was Beatrice’s cryptic map with its drawn-from-memory outline that used only landmarks, some of which were lost to time, as a guide. It took over an hour.

Taki didn’t complain once. When Klaus turned to look at him, he was often looking through the canopy or examining the leaves of shrubbery with his hand. Klaus had never seen him so relaxed.

The last time we were hiking through trees like this, Klaus realised, was during that terrible drill in Luckenwalde. A world away, even though they were closer to Luckenwalde then than they had been in Taki’s country. He smiled.

They realised they had finally found Beatrice’s hideaway when they stepped through the trees into an exquisite little clearing.

It wasn’t big but it was striking. From the opposite line of trees, a tiny strand of a creek flowed down over zig-zagging steps of mossy rocks, singing merrily, and flowed off in the direction of the fall. They inferred that the creek would meet other creeks and streams and end up charging powerfully over the mountainside.

The colours and the sounds of the clearing were both vibrant and muted, as though the scene was swathed in a thin sheen of unreality. The paradox of it made it easy for them to understand why Beatrice believed that no one else had ever been there. No other humans anyway. A doe and her fawn stared at them out of lazy concern from nearby, chewing solemnly, as though they’d never heard of hunters. Klaus even spied the orange eyes and hide of a fox once but it slipped away before he had the chance to show Taki.

They stood there and took it in for a moment. It would be hard to explain to Claudia, they realised, why the place had struck Beatrice so. And yet they could certainly feel it for themselves.

* * *

Earlier that morning, right after they solved the mystery of the map, Klaus flopped happily onto a chair at the kitchen table.

‘The war was a piece of cake compared to Mother.’ He rubbed his forehead and laughed hollowly. ‘A scale as a decoy. That’s just like her.’

Claudia remembered something and beamed at Taki.

‘She always said it would take a Wolfstadt to crack her map,’ she said. ‘Didn’t she, Klaus?’

Klaus lifted the corner of his mouth and winked at Taki.

‘It's official now,’ he said. 'Welcome to the pack.'

When Taki smiled at him, when they held each other’s gaze for a moment before remembering they weren’t alone, Claudia could almost forget the strange little shards of uncertainty she’d seen in them both over the past few weeks.

* * *

When Taki awoke he still felt Klaus' weight on his stomach. He breathed in the gentle smell of the grass and reached for Klaus' hair. He let the strands fall through his fingers for a few moments before he noticed something was different.

He glanced down.

Stretched along the ground, with its immense head on Taki's stomach, was the largest wolf he had ever seen. White fur that was almost blinding in the sunlight. Long ears that were lying flat, one against its head and the other along Taki's stomach. A long, powerful tail that stretched away into the grass.

It was a great deal larger than Taki.

Taki felt his heart pound. The creature was facing away so he couldn't be sure if it was awake. But the slow rise and fall of its ribs indicated it was sleeping, despite the fact that Taki had unthinkingly touched the long fur on the side of its face.

He tried to lift himself as slowly as he could. As he did so it occurred to him, in the way of a peripheral thought, that he was dressed in his ceremonial robes. He even felt the familiar shape of his headdress against his hair and scalp. But his thoughts were focused entirely on the monstrous animal lying on top of him. How he might be able to slip away without being –

With a deep inhale, the wolf stirred. And when it stood up, bearing its weight on four huge paws, when it turned its long face to look at Taki, and finally when Taki looked into its fiery yellow gaze, he remembered.

The wolf hovered over him for a time, its eyes like drops of gold against a backdrop of startling white, and Taki ran a hand over the warm fur of its neck.

With a subtle flick of its ears, the wolf then moved away. When Taki sat up, he saw that it had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was waiting for him.

He stood up and followed.

They walked until west became east. Until time began to wind backwards, slowly at first and then faster. They walked until they were in No Man's Land. In the time of their forefathers. In the time when gods walked among men and were far more willing to part with their gifts. They walked among shapeshifters and healers and telepaths. Telepaths. A vision came to Taki from his own future. Grey and red.

And still the wolf walked ahead of him. They walked for years.

Sometimes it would pause, as though waiting for Taki to catch up, for Taki to reach down and touch its head or its flank. As though this gave it the energy it needed to race ahead again in huge, gambolling leaps.

When the wolf finally stopped, it was at the top of an incline, beneath a tree with long, swaying tresses of violet flowers. It appeared to be looking out across at something.

Taki drew alongside the wolf, whose shoulders reached past his hip. He felt the warmth of its heat against his leg.

 _Not a dream,_ he said slowly. All this happened once, a long time ago.

Taki looked out across at the world beyond. The world that was being torn apart. He watched as flames of hatred wreaked the same havoc it would do for millennia. It was fast approaching where they stood. It would reach them soon.

 _They always win,_ Taki observed. _In one way or another._

The wolf was silent. It watched the approach of flame and fire with eyes that burned just as brightly.

Taki looked down at it. He tried to see how many different ways in which they would meet again. In how many different ways they would be torn apart again.

He crouched low beside the huge, silent creature. The sleeves of his robes draped across white as he threw his arm across its back. The other held onto the fur of its neck - the place he had softly stroked when he lay in a field far from there.

The wisteria whirled around them in alarm at the oncoming fire. At the clamour and carnage. It was only seconds away.

 _Let them come,_ he said, echoing words that would be spoken to him many years later.

The wolf raised its hackles and bared long, white fangs. Taki heard its low growl reverberate through his whole body. He gripped its fur. Felt its warmth one final time.

Even as the fire was on the point of engulfing them, they stared it down as one.[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-1.html/2/)

* * *

Taki awoke in the clearing with a start. He awoke to birds lost in their arias. To a warm and gentle sun. But he could still feel the heat of the fire. The wolf's fur.

Breathing hard, he craned his neck and glanced down.

Klaus. Asleep with his head on Taki's stomach.

He tried to calm his breathing. Not a lot of details came back to him from the dream. Only the memory of the wolf and the heat of the flames.

Chest still heaving, he slowly lay back down with his neck still craned, suddenly unwilling to take his eyes off Klaus. He touched his hair again. Both soft and coarse. Both softer and coarser than the wolf's.

He wished he could remember more from the dream. It had seemed important somehow.

Klaus' hand lay outstretched on the grass, palm-up, huge fingers curled in slightly. Taki wanted to feel its warmth again. It would be as easy as reaching out and taking it. Only the deer witnessed Taki debating with himself in that little clearing.

He didn't have long to dwell. Klaus took a sudden, deep inhale. His body awoke before he did. Taki's eyes followed the muscles of his core and legs flexing and stretching before Klaus opened his eyes. They landed on Taki.

‘I had an amazing dream,’ he said, his voice still heavy with sleep. ‘But you wouldn't believe me if I told you.’

Taki held his breath.

‘What was it?’

‘I dreamed –’ He turned his head and kissed Taki's stomach. ‘– that I was on a train. Which you stopped just so you could get on it.’

He turned a bit more and kissed Taki's stomach again, licking and sucking delicately on the skin.

Taki breathed out, both relieved and strangely disappointed.

‘And then I dreamed you came with me to my little cottage. And met my family. And that you lay naked beneath me in a field of grass.’

A flash of his crooked smile.

‘Told you you wouldn't believe me.’

Taki wasn’t sure if it was the words or the hoarseness of his voice or the lips and tongue on his stomach, but it felt as though the sun, pleasant and warm only seconds ago, was melting him.

They lay in the grass a few paces away from the mossy steps of the creek, where a grey bird with a long, sharp, black beak was watching them warily. Its beady stare reminded Klaus so strongly of Suguri that he had to bite back a laugh.

He lifted slightly so he hovered and made his way slowly up Taki's body, flashes of his dangerous gaze – eyes like the fire that engulfed us, Taki thought – interspersed with his bending down to kiss his skin.

‘How long was I out?’ he asked when he reached Taki's neck.

‘About an hour,’ Taki replied, trying to keep his voice steady.

Klaus kissed him deeply. Again, the warmth of the sun seemed to resonate through his lips. Just as Taki felt himself stiffening, Klaus pulled off and rolled away onto his back. In the same move, he pulled Taki to his chest, this time making sure his left hip was in the air.

Taki marvelled at how Klaus could so effortlessly do to Taki's whole body what Taki had struggled to do with just Klaus' hand. His inadequacy stung him yet again.

‘We should think about heading back soon,’ Klaus said. ‘Might take us a while to find the fall again. And Claudia will be back in a few hours.’

The desire to stay suddenly took hold of Taki with an irrational strength.

He stared at the mossy rocks and gently swaying canopy. He thought of the waterfall. His strange burst of nostalgia when he laid eyes on Klaus' wheat fields for the first time. The cottage. The immediate embrace of Klaus’ family.

An entire west that had been hidden from him. First in the cold, purposeful year at Luckenwalde where he had seen bigotry and hostility. Then throughout the war where he’d spent all of his energies in seeing the west fall.

And now here he was. Engulfed in warmth he didn’t know the world was capable of. A beauty that was different from that of his own land.

He thought of what Klaus had said to him so casually under the laburnums. _What if you came with me to my country?_

Before he had even had the time to consider whether such a life was possible, he had found himself on a train with Klaus.

This isn’t forever, he reminded himself, unaware that Klaus had told himself that at the beginning of their trip. This is for Klaus. For Claudia. Taki's duties still awaited in the east. They were less immediate and less overwhelming with the war over and with the rise of the new Meiji dynasty. But he couldn’t turn his back on all of it. Not even for fields so gold they hurt his eyes.

Klaus had one arm hooked around Taki's waist. The other hand held Taki’s in a still, gentle grip.

With uncanny timing, Taki heard the question murmured into his hair.

‘Do you miss home?’

When Taki didn’t answer immediately, he went on.

'It must be hard to have just, you know, up and left everything behind so suddenly.’

And then, with the precision of a blade, Hans’ voice sliced through him again.

_Have you ever asked him? What it’s like to have given everything up for you?_

Again. Again, Klaus was so easily able to ask him something that Taki had spent the past year shirking.

Klaus had no idea about the gravity of his words. He'd spoken them without thinking of himself at all, and only out of concern for the eastern prince who'd left his home for a cottage bordered by wilderness.

So he was relieved when, in a slightly stiff voice, Taki replied, ‘I don't miss it. Not really.’

He felt the steady pulse of Klaus' heart beneath his ear. Klaus wondered if, through that, he could sense his relief.

‘Any more word from the division?’ he asked.

‘Not since Uemura’s last letter. They’re still transferring equipment and soldiers to permanent outposts. And rebuilding all the settlements affected by battle. It’ll take another month.’

The wind-down process had been delayed significantly since Taki’s abduction, and then again following international tension surrounding Mussolin’s downfall.

‘They’ll send the officers home not long after that.’

Something occurred to Klaus.

‘The cadets would be gone by now, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. So Haruki’s back home, is he?’

He felt a sudden pang of regret for having been unable to say goodbye to the cadet properly. It occurred to him that he might never see the kid again.

‘Strange to think he’s only Rudi’s age. He’s already been through so much.’

He then smiled at the memory of a voice talking to him from a tree branch outside his cell window.

Taki seemed off in the distance again. Klaus guessed his mind was back in the compound overseeing it all. Worrying about the details. Wondering what he might have missed.

‘How long a leave of absence can they expect from their commander?’ Klaus asked, trying to sound offhand.

He’d spent the past month wondering whether Taki was about to sit him down and explain that they needed to go back to reality. And when weeks passed and Taki didn't seem at all inclined to think about the return journey, Klaus had lost the nerve to bring it up himself.

Taki looked at him as if surprised.

‘For however long you need to be here with Claudia.’

The way Taki looked at him then, as though the answer should have been obvious, made Klaus’ throat suddenly close up with love. Gratitude.

Two steps forward and one step back.

Better than before, Klaus thought. Far better than during the war. Two forward and one back, after all, means one forward in the end. They were inching ahead. One step at a time.

Be thankful, he told himself, for that one step. And how much it meant that Taki was taking it at all.

‘You sure?’ he asked finally, aware of that his voice sounded a little too weighed down by emotion. He cleared his throat as casually as he could. ‘As much as I love that you're here, I don't want you to regret anything.’

Taki fell silent.

The only time he'd been afraid of regretting anything was the morning when Klaus kissed his lips and shoulder while Taki was still in bed before turning to leave. The moment when Taki saw the train pulling out of the station and ordered the nearby station master to bring it to a stop, with Uemura repeating that order as Taki ran for the nearest door.

That was the closest he'd come to feeling like he'd made a mistake.

He stared at the hand enveloping his and suddenly, almost without thinking, he pulled his fingers away slightly. He then brought them back to touch Klaus' fingers. The large thumb first. Then the knuckles.

He remembered his heart pounding in his ears when he walked from carriage to carriage scanning for a tan coat and blonde hair. Then finally seeing it, seeing for a brief moment that look on Klaus’ face as he stared out the window; something close to loneliness. Perhaps just wistfulness.

In that moment, Taki had experienced a feeling similar to when he commanded tanks on the battlefield. There were times when he didn't know; when he was just taking shots in the dark and hoping he had done right. And other times when he knew. Like a voice that knew better had whispered in his ear. And he knew there was only one place to send Murakumo.

Just like that, in the split second before he slid the glass-panelled door open, he knew that compartment was the only place he needed to be.

Klaus, meanwhile, only felt Taki running his fingers over his hand. He almost felt like holding his breath.

Taki lay the back of his hand against Klaus' palm. Then he laced their fingers together, taking time to observe how different they were to his own, in colour and shape and size.

_Have you ever asked him?_

No, he hadn't. Instead he curled Klaus's fingers down over his own, brought his hand to his lips and kissed it. As Klaus watched, he then hesitated and brought it to rest beneath his chin.

For a long while afterwards, Klaus felt the warmth of Taki’s lips on the back of his hand.

His unexpected little move left Klaus with two options.

Either he could settle peacefully into the sun-filled tenderness of the moment and say and do absolutely nothing; grafting the moment, the first time Taki had ever wilfully kissed any part of his body, to his memory in that slow, serene way that was befitting of Taki Reizen.

Or he could cave to his baser instincts and destroy the moment completely.

To his credit, he chose wisely for a few seconds, seconds filled only by rustling grass and bird calls.

Then he caved.

‘That was a bad move,’ he whispered in Taki's ear. He then licked the inside of Taki's ear and felt the shiver that raced through Taki's body. ‘I'm never letting you leave this place again.’

With his free arm still hooked around Taki, he reached over and grasped his cock, which had already begun to harden. Taki let out a small groan.

Klaus pulled him closer and started stroking it slowly at first and then faster. He felt Taki grip the hand beneath his chin harder. He grinned, wondering if Taki was even aware of it. He shifted his body so he was lying sideways facing Taki, pressing his face into Taki's cheek, watching and feeling him flush, hearing how his breathing got more insistent.

The thrill of the transformation, Klaus thought. He wished he could record it and play it over to himself at his leisure.

From that angle, with Taki practically lying on the arm that was slowly stroking his cock, Klaus struggled a bit.

‘I'm going to need my other hand back.’

Taki pulled himself out of the hypnosis of slowly mounting pleasure and released Klaus' right hand, which he realised he had been clenching beneath his chin. He blushed at the look Klaus gave him.

And yet, immediately on the heels of embarrassment, Taki was surprised to feel something else. Something that was both new and carried the hint of something that had been lurking in the back of his mind for a while.

The hand Taki released immediately found his lips and pushed past them roughly. The same lips that had kissed him so softly moments ago, Klaus thought, his cock hardening painfully against Taki's thigh. He pushed his fingers under Taki's tongue, then back up over it, then almost all the way into his throat, just shy of engaging his gag reflex.

Taki felt both the hand on his cock and the one in his mouth and his body tensed up with anticipation. Klaus' touch in that moment was no different to the sunlight. It was everywhere and it was hot and insistent and it lapped and stroked his body without paying any heed to him.

He sucked on Klaus' fingers and finally brought himself to look up at Klaus as he did so. The glint in Klaus' eyes, the mercilessness and danger there, made his cock leak even more.

It was hard to reconcile with the man who was sleeping with his docile hand outstretched only minutes ago. Though he didn't realise, his thought about the transformation was again almost identical to one that had already crossed Klaus' mind.

Suddenly the fingers were out of his mouth. Before he had time to draw breath, he felt them near his hole, pushing his cheeks apart. And then they were inside him again.

He moaned.

His head was off Klaus' chest and on the ground again, back arched, chin in the air. He tried stuffing the back of his hand in his mouth but Klaus' other hand, momentarily lifting away Taki’s from cock, moved it away at once.

‘I want to hear you,’ Klaus said, voice rumbling. ‘I want to hear you moan for me. Do it.’

‘Ah… Klaus!’

A third finger was added. Klaus pushed his fingers hard, as far as he could go, the force of his arm pushing Taki's entire body up along the ground by a few inches.

_‘Ugh!’_

‘Again. Say my name again.’

He opened his eyes. Klaus' body was hunched over him.

‘Klaus...’

All three fingers pushed in again roughly.

_‘Nngh!'_

‘Louder.’

And they pushed again.

‘Ugh... Klaus!'

Klaus hung his head and breathed in the skin of Taki's neck. Hearing Taki gasp for him like that was like a shot of morphine rushing straight to his head.

Somewhere in the back of Klaus' mind, he worried that he had scared Taki away from ever taking the initiative again. That Taki would now fear he would be set upon if he ever showed the slightest bit of affection.

That worry was easily pushed aside by the thought of burying his cock inside Taki's body and pulling out just in time to come on his bare stomach in the sunlight.

And then Taki understood the feeling. It was power.

Klaus was on top of him and his fingers were inside him. And yet, when Taki recalled the large, still figure asleep with his head on Taki's stomach, he understood how much power he wielded. He alone had changed Klaus into this.

It was the same feeling he'd had a long time ago when he'd taken Klaus into his mouth of his own accord for the first time. It was the same feeling he’d had when the huge white wolf charged ahead in breathtaking bounds after a single touch from its master.

‘Klaus...’

And so he chanted his name and forgot how many times he did so. He felt Klaus' fingers thrusting over and over, chasing after something. He now realised Klaus's hand was only there, doing that, because Taki had taken it and held it and kissed it.

The thought brought him very close to the brink.

When Klaus’ fingers were finally withdrawn and Taki’s legs were pulled around Klaus' hips, he gripped the back of Klaus's neck and braced.

He thought about the hand he had taken. And held. And kissed.

* * *

_I love you._

_I always will. I never once stopped._

_I've loved you since Luckenwalde. I remember the love I felt for you more than the shock or the shame of that love. To this day, I suspect that I fell for you even before you did. I pushed those feelings down, deep down, until the night you sat next to me on my bed._

_I even loved you for that fleeting moment when I was a child and you held me in your arms._

_I loved you every time you roared ahead of me to face my enemies and win my battles. I wish you knew how my heart leapt every time you came back._

_I loved you even on that terrible day in your room when you were hurting me. I loved you even as I begged you to stop. I knew why. I knew it was my fault. Your pain hurt me more than my own._

_I loved you even when Hans lied and made me believe you no longer wanted me._

_I loved you even as I cast you from my side._

_I loved you even when I thought you weren't coming. And when I was alone. And when you came for me. Took me home. And when you waited beside me, watching over me, until I was strong again. You’re the reason I became strong again._

_You’re the light not only in my life but in the lives of everyone you’ve ever touched. There is something that shines from you that I’ve never seen before, something that is every bit as god-sent as Hans’ gift._

_There are times when I still don’t know what to do with it. With all of that brightness that you’ve given me so freely. So selflessly. I’m still learning. And you’re still waiting._

_I know how long you've waited for me._

_More than anything else, I hope one day I can be someone who deserves everything you’ve given me. Someone who deserves your light and is worthy of being by your side._

_But I fear, even more so now, with the war behind us and with so little standing in our way, that that time may never come. I fear that I will one day have to face something I've suspected for a long time. Something that has held me back almost as much as my vows to my people._

_That you deserve more than me. That I'm not whatever it is you've spent your whole life searching for._

_But still, I will try. We are bound until death and I will spend all of that time trying. I hope I'm doing better. I hope it's enough that you can feel it, even if you can't hear it._

_That I do. And always will._

_And never once stopped._  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taki’s thoughts here, as well as Klaus and Claudia's conversation about happiness in the previous chapter, are echoes of things that were mentioned a long time ago in the prologue. Which is set far in the future.
> 
> I wasn't sure whether to leave this author's note at all really but I wanted, firstly, to say sorry for the uneventfulness. This chapter was just sex and dreams and more sex haha. And also I wanted to drop a few hints and explain why I can't seem make these two happy for very long. I hope it’s getting through that they’re closer to finding peace. That they're just struggling a bit to settle into post-war Klaus and Taki. And that the above issues don't become real issues for a while. Still keen to hear your thoughts on them though, on questions of Klaus' happiness and Taki's insecurity, whether you agree with what I’ve said so far or not.
> 
> Next update might not be for a while, a few weeks maybe - sorry guys! The last three chapters only came out fast because they were knocking about in my head and refusing to let me do much else lol. But hope to see you when the updates happen again, and really hope you're enjoying so far :)
> 
> PS In case you missed it, there’s a little asterisk link at the end of Taki's dream that leads to one of Inariya-sensei's stunning artworks. I remember that drawing didn't register properly the first time I saw it (it's the very first drawing you see in MR, after all - it’s right after the cover shot and before the first chapter even begins). And I was halfway through the whole manga before it occurred to me that wolf all the way back on Page 1 had golden eyes.


	25. Pay Attention

Hans Regenwalde had once wondered whether Klaus knew how much of the commander’s thoughts went to him. How frequently and how deeply.

_I do. And always will._

_And never once stopped._

He had seen it all on the day he told Taki of his power. The day that Taki had let Hans in and everything had poured from him like floodwaters in a deluge. His regrets, his guilt, his fears. It was almost all Klaus, Hans had realised quickly.

He alone knew the weight of Taki’s true feelings and secrets. Secrets that died with him on a cold mountainside in No Man's Land.

* * *

Even though Hans would be the first and last to know the true depth of Taki’s feelings, Klaus began to notice. He began to notice very gradually.

So gradually, in fact, that it would take him years to see it properly. And, on a whim of intuition, he was careful to make sure Taki wasn’t aware that he was slowly becoming aware.

It began during the spring he spent with Taki in the cottage with the rose garden.

It began when Taki took his hand and kissed it in a clearing that Beatrice von Wolfstadt had discovered years ago. The clearing Beatrice had only ever showed her husband and in which, though they had never told anyone else, their third child had been conceived.

Ever since the moment he felt Taki's lips on his hand, Klaus began to notice other things. Like tiny shards of gold shining at the bottom of a river, glinting occasionally, blurred by the current. Easy to miss if he wasn't paying attention.

So he started to pay attention.

* * *

A month and a half into their stay at the cottage, spring was well underway with all of its fickleness. A day of thunderstorms would follow a day of blinding, adamant sunshine. And yet the atmosphere at the Strauss cottage managed to capture the sunny moments within their walls, even when shutters were hurriedly drawn closed and sandbags propped against the doors as a precaution against flooding.

The sunniness that lasted regardless of weather owed to the abundant humour of the two Wolfstadt siblings. Klaus’ laughter would ring throughout the house and Claudia in turn would be gasping for breath between bouts of scolding and laughing. The mood was infectious and Taki would, on occasion, be swept up in it enough to chuckle quietly, which, though he didn’t know, was a huge part of why they kept it up in the first place.

And Claudia steadily improved. The doctor had mostly good things to say, she reported, which she interpreted as a free licence to do more things around the house. She used the wheelchair a lot less and she had put on weight. Her cheeks were full again, rosy like Klaus remembered, and most days she had no trouble doing things like bringing in the washing, though Klaus still kept an eye out whenever she tried anything strenuous. There were days on end when she would walk about and sing to herself and even swing Heinrich up into the air.

It was on one of those days that Klaus came through the front door and saw, scattered like green snow in the doorway to the kitchen, little mounds of chopped parsley. He hurried into the kitchen to see Claudia on the floor, one hand on the counter and struggling to get to her feet.

‘I was being stupid,’ she assured Klaus when he helped her up, his face pale. ‘I tried to reach for something on the top shelf and my back sort of… buckled. Brought the chopping board down with me. Silly, really.’

When her pain steadily worsened over the next hour, Klaus put her in Verner's truck and drove them to the doctor. She worried about the grim-faced, seething Klaus who barely spoke to her on the way. After the appointment, Klaus had willingly taken the brunt of the doctor's admonitions. The words ‘degenerative’ and ‘fragile’ had resonated with him even more than the doctor’s cautious optimism about her recovery. The lecture had ended with the doctor reminding Klaus that she was still sick and needed rest above all else. And then he also suggested that Klaus keep doing whatever he was doing, because, for the most part, it seemed to be working.

* * *

Taki almost always awoke before Klaus did. He had inadvertently made a ritual out of glancing at Klaus’ sprawled, sleeping form on the couch before he opened windows to let in the smell of the wheat field and started making breakfast before the family awoke.

But one morning Klaus happened to sit up on the couch earlier than anyone else. After two days of storms, he was pleased to see the sun making its first appearance. He walked through the small, silent kitchen, feeling the pleasant smoothness of the flagstones against the soles of his feet and opened the back door.

Scrubbed clean, still bearing the memory of the downpour, the yard and rose garden and the hint of golden fields to the east and north filled his senses. He breathed in the scent of grass and hay and soil. He tried to pick up the scent of roses.

Two ways of doing that, he thought with an impish grin that no one saw. His mind wandered into the room that had, until recently, housed an ancient boiler. Instead, he went barefoot down the steps onto the damp earth.

A few minutes later, Taki, who had started on breakfast in the kitchen, was surprised to see Klaus step into the kitchen through the back door holding several fresh young stems in his hand. The blossoms were all white, all bearing trembling little beads of water on their petals, beads so perfectly round and so deviously positioned that they could have been drops of candle wax.

‘Morning,’ Klaus said with a crooked smile that still managed, after years, to make Taki’s pulse surge for a brief moment.

As Taki stirred the batter for poffertjes, Klaus drew out a pair of kitchen scissors and expertly trimmed the thorns off the stems.

‘Here,’ he said as he held them out to Taki.

There was a pause before Taki set the bowl down on the countertop. He then took the flowers and glanced at Klaus, feeling only poignant embarrassment.

Klaus drew out the seconds to better absorb the sight of Taki standing in Klaus’ kitchen mutely holding roses, before he chuckled.

‘For the table,’ he explained. ‘My hands are muddy.’

Taki blinked and looked away, adding foolishness to the list of strange emotions conjured by that moment. He found an empty vase and filled it with water.

Klaus wiped his hands on a dishtowel as he left the kitchen.

 _Pay attention_ , said a small voice in his head. It was a voice that had cropped up since the afternoon they had spent in the clearing.

And so, just before Klaus went out of sight, he spared a glance over his shoulder.

Taki had set the vase, a clear, round one similar to a goldfish bowl, in the middle of the table and had propped up the four or five stems against the rim. He was facing away from Klaus as he straightened.

Unaware that Klaus was watching, Taki then took a moment to stare at the flowers, his face angled just slightly, just enough for Klaus to see his small smile. He reached out and lightly touched one of the roses, rubbing the soft petal between his fingers. The moment hung in the air, as though suspended in its own dewdrop, before Taki turned back to the counter and lit the stove.

Klaus forced himself to keep walking. To preserve the moment as it was. A moment, small thought it was, which he would normally have missed.

He berated himself for other moments he may have missed in the past. Times when he waited for the word or for the declaration and shut his eyes and ears to anything short of that. Times when he waited for something that would trigger a waterfall of words, a real one, one like their moment on his bike in No Man’s Land. The frustration of never hearing it. The anger at himself. The weight of his inadequacy.

While he was busy with all of that self-indulgent, self-pitying nonsense, he would have missed so much.

He remembered again how Taki had held him all night after Hasebe nearly killed him. How Taki had so easily forgotten the unforgivable thing Klaus had done only hours before that. How Taki had brought him to life as he lay dying on a riverbank. He had been trying to show his love the entire time and Klaus had been too thick and impatient to see it.

_Sometimes it’s more important to feel it rather than to hear it._

And so now he forced himself to be patient. To stop searching. To stretch his arms out and fall backwards into the white, coursing river and let it take him wherever he wanted.

 _We have time now_ , he had once told Taki on the train, his naivety sounding sharply across the intervening year. _We can take it slow._

He had been wrong back then. On many counts. But now, they really did have time. And he had time to watch and wait.

* * *

And he noticed all sorts of little things.

Like how Taki would watch him out of the corner of his eye. Smile at something Klaus had said when he thought Klaus couldn’t see. The way that Taki and Claudia would sometimes fall silent when Klaus came into the room, which gave him the odd, vaguely uncomfortable feeling they had been talking about him, but the flush on Taki’s cheeks hinting that, hopefully, it hadn’t been all bad.

On the day he handed Taki a small bouquet of roses, the temperature outside steadily rose until the heat was once again near oppressive, as though to make up for the storms of the previous week. Not only that, their chores had doubled during the rain-filled pause, topped off by overgrown lawns and gardens.

Taki, hunched over and weeding, found himself throwing guilty glances at Klaus who had paused mowing the lawn to peel his sweat-drenched shirt off and mop the back of his neck with it.

Despite Klaus’ new mantra, he managed to miss these surreptitious looks. It was too hot to focus on anything but the mower and grass. He tossed the shirt aside and kept mowing.

Wiping his forehead with the back of his gardening glove, Taki tried to block out images of the sweat-sheen on Klaus' back and the gleaming, taut muscles of his abdomen. Thoughts that had made him sick with guilt and shame only a year ago now only made him flush self-consciously.

He was both glad and remorseful when he finished weeding and had no further reason to be outside by the time Klaus, still sans shirt, dragged piles of lumber to the chopping block and picked up an axe.

* * *

Eva ran inside an hour later, excited enough that a hair had escaped her carefully done pigtails.

‘Ori’s back!’ she told Taki, taking his hand again and pulling him towards the door. ‘And she’s sleeping with Klaus!’

Taki wondered if he had misheard.

Eva pulled him into the rose garden where he spied Klaus lying on the bench, one knee bent in the air. On his bare chest, curled into a geometrically perfect circle, was a white cat with small black markings on its back. Both were fast asleep.

They approached silently so they wouldn’t wake the pair. Klaus’ mouth was slightly open and he snored faintly. Eva gently tickled the cat's ears in a way that didn't rouse her and then she turned and grinned at Taki.

The peace was shattered when Heinrich appeared out of nowhere wearing a tablecloth for a cape and making a series of noises quite uncannily like a Beaufighter taking off.

Klaus awoke abruptly and was startled to find he had an audience. He was even more startled to find that there was a furry weight on his chest.

‘What the –?’

‘Heinrich!’ Eva complained loudly. She bunched her hands into fists and stormed after her brother, who was veering off towards the washing line, consumed in his own world.

‘Hey, Ori,’ Klaus said hoarsely as the cat stretched its front legs hyperbolically far, claws extended. 'I was wondering where you'd gone.' He then squinted up at Taki who was partially silhouetted by the sun. ‘Last time I saw her was over a year ago when I came to tell Claudia I was running off with you.’

The cat pushed her lean face into Klaus’ hand as he scratched it.

‘Does she belong to the family?’ Taki asked.

‘Barely. Wanders for weeks before coming back. We could never tell if she loves us or not.’

As if she had understood him, Ori fixed Klaus with a withering look before tucking her paws back under her body. Klaus grunted in pain when her claws, under the guise of kindly massage, gently dug into his bare skin.

‘Ah! Mother of –!’

Taki gently lifted her up. She hung over his hands like a wet cloth for a few moments before folding against Taki. The purring took up in no time.

‘Guess she’s got a new favourite.’

Strangely comforted by the warmth of her small body, Taki sat on the bench by Klaus’ feet. Ori made a show of curling up on his lap. He felt her claws dig into the fabric of his trousers and he winced slightly.

Klaus watched them for a few moments before closing his eyes again, feeling the heavy rays of sunlight cooling the sweat on his chest and face. His arms ached pleasantly from mowing. Breathing in the smell of roses, he nearly drifted off again.

_Pay attention._

He opened his eyes to see Taki look away. With a faint blush on his cheeks. Klaus’ heart soared.

* * *

He took a second in the mid-morning peace, in the garden that had been his refuge growing up, to really look at Taki again.

He was somewhat surprised to discover that he still couldn't be sure of the precise shade of Taki's eyes. They were almost black at times but took on a shade of blue in the sun that was almost like sapphire. What had always struck him more than their colour was their depth. A well of insight. Gravity that pulled him in every time without fail. Sincerity that cut through to the core of its audience, saw everything without trying, and made Klaus feel small and blustering by comparison.

Klaus took in everything else. Cheeks and jaw so refined they could have made under the loving hand of a sculptor. Casual elegance in his civilian clothes, though still with the hint of the admiration he inspired in his uniform; in that jade coat Klaus hadn’t seen for nearly two months. A body that was lithe and agile. Ferocious when called on. Teeming with silent strength.

He was designed. It was the only way Klaus could put it to himself. His beauty was something beyond the world Klaus knew.

I never stood a chance, he thought with a small grin.

‘I was looking at you the other day,’ he said, his voice as gentle as the breeze. ‘In Verner’s orchard. You remember? He was up on his ladder and he handed down an apple and you stared at it for a while before looking at me.’

Taki remembered it. He’d felt oddly guilty about the apple that had been freshly plucked from its source of life. He had looked at the plump red skin, yellow in patches, rosy and ripe, and felt a strange happiness that, like so much else over the past few weeks, was new to him.

‘I was a few trees over and I saw you,’ Klaus said. ‘It was like I was seeing you for the first time. I don’t know why.’

Taki felt a little heat rise up his neck. Even when it was just him and Klaus, he felt the spotlight swing on him in a way that made him ill at ease. Like he was on display.

‘You’re so beautiful. Really.’

Taki looked away, suddenly grateful he was out of Klaus’ reach. He fought the urge to make an excuse and leave the bench. Each and every time he had heard Klaus make similar remarks, a part of him couldn’t help but feel like he was being made fun of.

‘No one’s ever told you that before me, have they?’ Klaus said, the thought occurring to him for the first time. He thought about the mother that had died when Taki was very young. The minders and teachers who would have felt it wasn't their place to tell their young master such a thing. ‘I doubt Suguri ever took that rake out of his ass long enough to tell you.’

Ori purred in Taki’s lap. The soft pink of her upturned paws contrasted with her white fur and, for some reason, reminded Taki of the wolf with the golden eyes.

‘I mean it, you know,’ Klaus said. ‘It’s been two years, but there are still times I look at you and feel like I dreamt you up.’

It was clear how uncomfortable Taki was. Klaus suspected he was still on the bench only by dint of whatever they had found together over the past few weeks. It made Klaus feel strangely stubborn. It seemed unfair for the entire world to be aware of something that eluded Taki alone.

At that point, Klaus would normally have sat up and pulled Taki towards him for a kiss. He imagined how Ori might watch them through judgmental eyes or else just spring indignantly off Taki’s lap.

Instead, he repeated his mantra.

Like Hans would have done, he told himself. Pay attention like Hans would have. What would Hans have seen?

He ignored the tightness of Taki’s lips and mouth, the stiffness of his posture. He saw the hand gently stroking Ori’s fur; the only point on his body that had escaped his sudden tension.

No, not the only point, Klaus realised. Taki’s eyes, still focused on Ori, seemed to be slowly softening. As though Klaus’ words had fallen on him like hail but were now melting peacefully.

Taki then cast a fleeting look at Klaus. A look that was ephemeral but loaded with meaning. It was so quick Klaus couldn’t be sure if he had seen or read it clearly.

But he felt that emotion for his own. He felt how it must overwhelm Taki, how _he_ must overwhelm Taki, and he felt both guilty and winded. He wondered how often it had happened; how many things Klaus had said in passing had thrown Taki like that.

The tip of Ori’s tail flicked in her sleep.

 _They have a secret language,_ Heinrich had once told Claudia with a bright smile.

You’re weren’t far off the mark, buddy, Klaus thought, amused by the five-year-old’s acuity. I’m learning a new one now. It’s taken me two years, but I’m learning.

He realised how much it would take. How much uncertainty and doubt he would face. How much frustration. How many moments of self-loathing. But if it meant that he would occasionally come up against moments like this, like little specks of gold on the river bed, then he would withstand all the cold currents the world had to offer. He would never go as deep as Hans had gone. But he was going to try.

They were bound until death, and he was willing to spend all of that time trying.

* * *

Ori’s unexpected arrival wasn’t the only one of its kind that day. Unlike hers, however, the next arrival managed to break the peace of the Strauss cottage cleanly in two.

Afternoon was sliding lazily towards evening. Despite the season’s fickleness during the day, spring nights in the countryside were reliably chilly. Klaus’ axe still thudded in the distance, making fresh kindling for that night’s fire.

Claudia had been resting in bed after taking her medication when Heinrich clambered under the covers with a picture book. After admonishing her brother for disturbing their mother’s rest, Eva had quietly slipped into bed on Claudia’s other side and listened about the wolf and the hare.

All three were now snoozing peacefully, before dinner had even been started. Taki walked in on them and decided to move the children to their own beds and leave Claudia to her early bedtime.

After he lowered Heinrich to his bed, Taki noticed with a twinge how the child turned onto his back in his sleep and curled his left hand beneath the pillow, in perfect imitation of his uncle.

Back in Claudia's bedroom, Eva’s eyes flickered open for a moment when Taki picked her up. She smiled and rested her head on his shoulder.

When he heard loud footsteps in the hallway, he assumed it was Klaus and didn’t turn around.

Then he felt Eva lift her head.

‘Papa!’

Taki felt a wave of dread even before he turned, and one that amplified when he found himself face to face with Wilhelm Strauss for the first time. There was a type of cold, quivering shock in his eyes that Taki had seen before in enemy soldiers.

He was tall and angular with a short mane of shaggy brown hair, a thin moustache and line beard that ran up his sideburns. Heavy boots and drab, slightly stained work clothes. Thin lips hanging slightly open. And bright blue eyes, the exact shade of Eva’s, staring at the stranger in his wife’s bedroom.

Taki was too taken aback to say anything. For a charged few moments, Wilhelm was too.

Then he found his voice.

‘I want you out of my house.’

The command was deep and quiet and managed to fill the whole room. Without giving him a chance to come up with a reply, Wilhelm walked heavily to Taki, who was still frozen, and took Eva out of his arms.

‘Did you hear me?’ he demanded, his voice still level and still containing the simmering, icy threat.

Claudia stirred awake. Her eyes rounded in shock at the sight of her husband.

‘Wilhelm! What –?’

‘What is he doing here?’

Claudia heard his tone and alarm bells went off. She sat up gingerly, her mind racing.

‘What are you -? I thought you weren't coming back for weeks!’

‘Don’t change the subject. I asked you what he was doing here.’

‘He – Wilhelm, let me explain –’

Wilhelm turned back to Taki, who braced himself. He saw how Eva clung ashen-faced to her father.

‘Get out of this house right now,’ repeated Wilhelm, his words delivered slowly and carefully, his anger rolling from him in waves. From up close, Taki saw the creases in the corners of his eyes and places where goggles would have left a mark. ‘Or I’ll throw you out myself.’

‘Try it and see what happens.’

Wilhelm turned and experienced a flare of anxiety somewhere in the pit of his anger. He had forgotten how large his brother-in-law was. Even standing in the doorway, Klaus seemed like a threat.

Taki recognised the look in Klaus’ eye, one he hadn’t seen since he and Hans had been in the same room. His stomach churned.

Wilhelm recovered quickly. He stared Klaus down, having made the connection soon after seeing the foreigner in his home.

‘Who do you think you are?’ Again the words were slow and cold, with the brunt of his anger trembling behind each syllable. He slid Eva to the ground. ‘Threatening me? Bringing enemy soldiers under _my_ roof without my permission?’

Claudia got to her feet, trying to ignore the little rivets of pain that shot up her spine from her lower back.

‘Wilhelm please, Taki isn’t an –’

‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ he said to her. The pauses between his words were somehow worse than the words themselves. Claudia felt like shrinking. ‘Do you think I don’t know who he is? Has he told you how many of our people’s deaths he’s responsible for?’

‘He’s only been here to help me! He’s done nothing but –’

‘So you just let him come in here like nothing that happened in the war mattered. Did you not hear about Adalard’s brother? Or Lotte’s husband? All the men who aren't coming back because of people like him? You should be ashamed.’

Eva started crying quietly and tugged on her father’s hand.

‘Papa, don’t –’

‘I’m not going to tell you again, Wilhelm,’ Klaus said, taking a few steps into the room and trying to steady his voice. ‘You need to settle down.’

‘No one who has western blood on their hands is welcome here,’ Wilhelm said, pointing straight at Klaus’ chest, eyebrows raised, chin down. ‘And that includes you, Klaus. I don’t care what you’ve told yourself. You’re nothing but a traitor and a disgrace.’

It was a combination of things – the attack on Klaus, Eva’s tears and the look on Claudia’s face – that finally moved Taki to speak.

‘Master Strauss, I never intended –’

Wilhelm rounded on him again.

‘I wasn’t talking to you, _Schlitzaugen._ ’

No one could be sure if it was the half-step Wilhelm had taken in Taki’s direction or the phrase ‘slit eyes’ itself, an insult that seemed to have been hurtled straight from Taki’s year at Luckenwalde, but suddenly Klaus had Wilhelm by his shirt front and backed up against the window.

Eva screamed and Claudia’s hands flew to her face.

‘Klaus, stop!’ Taki called in alarm.

He was reminded of the day he and Uemura and Hasebe had all combined forces to keep Klaus away from Hans. Now it was him alone, trying to step between Klaus and Wilhelm, hands pushing his chest and arm, trying to ignore the unyielding glint in his eyes.

Despite his words and the seething anger he still carried in his eyes even when Klaus seized him, Wilhelm was by no means a fighter. He was always the type to stand back in barroom brawls, sip his beer with a straight, wry smile and wait for his freshly gap-toothed friend to emerge and ask for an arm to lean on.

And so, even when the much larger man had him pinned against the windowsill, it wasn’t in Wilhelm’s nature to throw punches. And he had a strong feeling he didn’t stand a chance even if he tried.

Klaus had always known that. And the knowledge managed to leak through the surge of loathing that his insult had inspired. He finally heard Taki’s voice telling him to let go. He released Wilhelm's shirt and stepped away.

Then he heard Eva sobbing. He saw, out of the corner of her eye, how her face was buried in Claudia’s dress. The guilt leaked in slowly as well.

‘That’s just typical,’ Wilhelm said, trying to straighten his collar, keeping his eyes on Klaus. ‘When you don’t like something you resort to your fists. Like an overgrown child –’

‘Please stop,’ Claudia begged, sounding like she was on the verge of tears. It wasn’t clear whom she was addressing.

Taki kept a hand on Klaus’ shoulder until he was sure he had calmed down. He glanced between him and Wilhelm and hoped the worst was over. He then turned to Eva and realised it would be best for everyone’s sake if the two of them left the room.

Eva lifted her tear-stained face from the folds of Claudia’s dress when Taki came to stand beside her.

‘How about we go outside?’ he said gently and offered his hand.

Still taking in great gulping breaths between tears, Eva quietly went with him. Everyone was relieved when Wilhelm made no move to stop them.

* * *

A month and a half ago, in one of her letters to Wilhelm, Claudia mentioned almost in passing that Klaus might be staying for a few days to help out around the house. Wilhelm had made no mention of him in his reply and so she breathed easy. When Klaus then arrived with Taki in tow, and when a few days was extended to several weeks, Claudia only sparingly reflected this in her letters. Assuming that their visits wouldn’t overlap, Claudia only spoke of her brother a few times and didn't once mention Taki.

So for Wilhelm, who was hit hard by the extended separation from his family and the specific bitterness that all of his efforts had been in vain at the close of the war, it was a shock that had taken on the quality of a bad joke. He had come home early, hoping to surprise his wife and children, and instead found himself face-to-face with Taki Reizen; someone who, in that moment, quite easily embodied the reason for pay cuts and long hours and time away from their family, and someone who was standing in his home holding his child as though he belonged there.

Wilhelm Strauss had no control over the war. No control over his wife’s condition. But he sure as hell could control who stayed in his house.

His reaction swiftly discredited Klaus and Taki's vain hopes regarding the war's aftermath. Having Eurote as a common enemy hadn’t done much. It seemed old wounds ran deeper than last-minute changes of alliance.

* * *

Taki watched as Eva carefully picked up a rose from the ground where the soil had smudged its white petals. The tall hedges of the garden shielded them from the wind that whipped the clouds into strange shapes.

‘Why does Papa hate you?’ she asked, her voice quiet and her eyes on the rose.

Taki felt his throat close up with an unfamiliar emotion. He wondered at how the simplest questions were often the most difficult to answer.

‘For a long time,' he said, 'we were on different sides of a big fight.’

‘You mean the war?’ she deduced easily.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you still on different sides now?’

Taki hesitated.

‘I’m not sure,’ he answered honestly. ‘But things are better now. And I think they’ll keep getting better. What do you think?’

She turned to him then, her eyes huge. And she nodded.

By the time Klaus found them, they had wandered over to the furthest hedge and Eva seemed to have recovered almost completely. Her smile faltered, however, when she saw Klaus. He crouched in front of her, apologised for what he had done and assured her that her uncle and her father were friends again. Eva offered him a reproachful smile and returned his hug before picking her way delicately through the garden.

‘That last part couldn’t have been a bigger lie,’ Klaus said as he watched her leave, blowing air out of his cheeks.

‘What happened?’

In a nutshell, the master of the house wanted them both out by morning. He had been close to turning them out that night itself and only Claudia managed to sway him.

They stood in silence for some time.

‘It’s my fault,’ Taki said softly. ‘You should stay. I’ll go.’

‘Not a chance,’ Klaus retorted without missing a beat. ‘And Wilhelm made it clear there’s no difference between you and me anyway. He doesn’t want me around either.’

He toed the ground with his boot and felt the cold wind on his bare forearms, wishing he’d brought a jacket.

‘Things will be easier for Claudia now, anyway,’ he said. ‘With him around to take care of the kids.’

Taki heard the doubt in his voice. He thought about Claudia’s tinkling laughter and generous smiles. And then the cold, dangerous gaze of her husband.

‘Why did she marry him?’

His concern for Claudia outweighed the thought that it wasn't his place to ask about such matters. He wondered if he had started seeing Claudia and the children as his own family.

‘You won’t believe me after what you just saw,’ said Klaus with a gruff sigh. ‘But the guy turns into a pussycat around her. It’s nauseating, really.’

The fact that Klaus was prepared to admit it meant it was probably true. Regardless, Taki found it difficult to see past the man’s antipathy.

Klaus continued to try, in an undertone, to rationalise their leaving. Taki remained silent. As Klaus spoke, Taki felt something lodge in his chest; a small, hard diamond of resolve.

* * *

That feeling was enough to remind him that Wilhelm was no different to the kinds of people he had faced in the past. And, unlike Klaus, he knew how to deal with them without getting carried away. Though Taki's pride did still, on occasion, get the better of him, he knew when it was more important to shelve it.

When Klaus was in the bathroom and Claudia was tucking Eva in bed, Taki approached Wilhelm in the kitchen where he stood at the sink, running hot water over dirty dishes. Taki waited for him to turn.

The look Wilhelm gave him was somewhat more subdued than before, but it still conveyed a coldness that ran deep.

He turned back to the sink.

‘I have nothing to say to you.’

Taki waited and weighed his words before speaking.

‘I understand why you don’t want me here,’ he began, his voice soft but firm. ‘And I respect it.’

There was only silence and the sound of running water.

‘But your wife is the only reason Klaus and I came.’

Wilhelm felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. Despite everything, he still felt a sliver of guilt over the insult he had hurled at Reizen; a word he normally abjured when he heard others use it.

Now, Reizen’s pacifying tone was laced with something else he didn’t quite identify. And the mention of Claudia had struck a nerve.

‘She’s better. You can probably see it too,’ Taki continued. ‘It’s because of Klaus and how much he’s been helping.’

‘So you’re a doctor, are you?’

But the scathing tone contained traces of doubt.

‘If I could, I would leave and have Klaus stay. But he would follow me.’

The strange words and tone made Wilhelm turn again and fix him with a look.

 _Good riddance to you both_ , he thought but suddenly couldn’t say. He was flooded with memories of Claudia before he left. The brave smile and the cheekbones that stood out far more than they ought to. On the morning that he left, as he stood by the short front gate, he had nearly yielded again. He had nearly forsaken the law and his duty in order to stay with her. But her assurances and Verner’s promise to keep an eye on her when he could and his nation's call had made him turn from the gate.

The guilt, however, he carried with him every step of the way.

Taki saw it in him, the shame of having let down the one person he cared about above all else, and he recognised it instantly. He suddenly felt a reluctant kinship with Wilhelm. The guilt. The pride. The love.

‘She doesn’t need him anymore,’ said Wilhelm suddenly, in a voice that was no longer edged with frost, one that Taki didn’t expect from him. ‘I can… I can take care of things.’

‘Klaus has been good for her,’ Taki insisted gently. ‘And it would be in her best interest if he were to stay until she’s better. And if we can forget... everything else in the meantime. For her sake.’

Wilhelm’s eyes flicked up at him suspiciously, at the young commander who had been responsible for so much of what had happened during the war. Why he should suddenly take such an interest in Wilhelm’s wife made no sense to him, no matter how much Claudia had tried to explain it over the past few minutes.

The heightened emotions and awful words from not long ago still hung around them like a vapour. Feeling responsible for it, Taki hoped he had at least done something to dispel it.

‘I appreciate your hearing me out,’ he said finally, with a touch of awkwardness.

When he was alone in the kitchen, Wilhelm stood there for a long time. His mind was a tangle of love and duty and old wounds and new alliances and the first time he had ever heard Claudia laugh.

* * *

The following morning, when Wilhelm was busy with a few repairs on his truck, Claudia rolled to Taki's door in her wheelchair and knocked, looking mortified.

‘I don't know how I can –’ she stuttered. ‘Last night, what Wilhelm said – I'm so sorry, Taki.’

‘It’s alright,’ he said.

‘He's just - not very good at expressing his emotions,’ she said, and cringed at her own words. ‘I know that sounds like a terrible excuse. But it's not about you. Not really. It's everything, it's the war and him having to leave me when he knew I wasn't well and he's just directing it all at you because, well –’

‘Because he has reason to.’

‘No, he doesn't,’ she said, her voice suddenly hard. ‘He absolutely does not. You helped your country win the war but you certainly didn't start it. And I'm sure he knows that, Taki. He –’

She sighed and paused.

‘He's always so silent and hard to read and then occasionally it all just bursts out of him like this. It's unforgivable, I know.’

Taki felt another strange squirm of empathy.

‘Claudia –’

‘I will make him apologise to you. I promise.’

But Wilhelm never did.

Although Klaus always saw this as evidence of Wilhelm's ill will and narrow-mindedness,Taki, who read him a lot better, knew that it was only due to his pride.

* * *

Taki never told Klaus of his brief conversation with Wilhelm, and so Klaus couldn’t be sure why Wilhelm had changed his mind about letting them stay. But he had begrudgingly accepted his half-hearted apology the following morning and offered one that was just as insincere. And since then they had tried, as best as they could, to move on.

In the first few days after the master of the house returned, it became clear that things were undoubtedly easier with him around. They had his truck whenever they needed it and no longer had to rely on Verner’s. There were now enough eyes and hands at the cottage to simultaneously take care of Claudia, the children and the chores. And Klaus slept easier at night knowing Wilhelm was beside her.

Taki observed that Klaus was right about him. The man was devoted to his wife. His every sense was tuned to her needs. With every cough, every breath that seemed laboured, every wince, he would get up from wherever he was and ask her what she needed. More often than not, she would put a gentle hand on his face and tell him to stop fussing.

The children were also glad to have him back. Heinrich would ride on Wilhelm's shoulders and he would inundate his father for the first time with stories of his aeronautical adventures around the property as Wolverine. He seemed to sense that his father’s long-held resentment of his uncle had relaxed, if only a little, and he wanted to milk it for all it was worth.

Wilhelm felt an anxious sort of relief over Claudia’s demonstrable, if somewhat unsteady, improvement. He remembered how frail she had been six months ago when he was called away. He felt, again, a begrudging respect for Klaus. 

And for Reizen, whom he noticed got along with his wife rather well. It irked him in a strange way when he saw them speaking softly to one another at the table or by the fireplace.

Amazingly, they didn't run into any more landmines since their first encounter. Even the topics that threatened to turn into something more were defused before impact.

‘Why are you making two casseroles?’ Wilhelm asked Claudia one day.

‘Taki's vegetarian,’ she replied.

Wilhelm made a face.

Klaus glared at him as though daring him to have a problem with it. This was despite the fact that Klaus had thought it the strangest thing in the world when Taki told him in Luckenwalde that he'd never once eaten meat.

The only time politics was ever brought up was when they watched the Kaiser making a nationwide address regarding the state of their economy since the close of the war.

‘I suppose you’re one of the nutters who thinks the Kaiser made a deal with the emperor?’ Klaus said, his incendiary words masked by a careless tone.

‘The Kaiser doesn’t have the power to do something like that,' Wilhelm said with a frown. 'He’s just a figurehead. Whoever you heard that from is an imbecile.’

Taki turned to look at him in surprise.

* * *

Later that evening, Wilhelm watched disapprovingly through the window at Klaus and Taki returning from the southern edge of the property where they had been mending the rabbit-proof fence. Even from that distance, it was clear they were lost in conversation. He couldn’t imagine what they could possibly have to say to one another when, in fact, they seemed to be polar opposites in almost every conceivable way.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said quietly to Claudia, who was beside him, watering the hydrangeas lining the sill. ‘It’s like he doesn’t even care. Like he has no shame about any of it. Abandoning his country. Following Reizen around like a lackey.’

Claudia sighed.

‘He’s not Taki’s lackey. He’s his knight.’

Wilhelm had heard Claudia use that word before and had always assumed she had romanticised the truth. Now he frowned.

‘In this day and age? That’s ridiculous.’

Claudia brushed her hair back from her eyes. She tried to remember if that had been her reaction too, when Klaus first came to her and told her he was leaving for the east. She had been too caught up in his smile – his barely contained happiness – to have really thought in such terms.

‘Don’t you remember how I tried to explain all this to you a year ago?’

‘Vaguely,’ Wilhelm muttered. He usually turned a deaf ear to anything concerning his rogue brother-in-law.

‘The customs in Taki’s country might seem a bit old-fashioned to us,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t make them any less important. Or real.’

She looked at the two of them approach the cottage with a faint smile.

‘What does it even mean? That Klaus is, what, his bodyguard? His second in command?’

‘He’s more like… Taki’s property.’

Wilhelm stared.

‘His _property?_ ’

‘From what I understand,’ said Claudia, aware of how it sounded but suddenly unwilling to put up a defence. She had defended Klaus to Wilhelm and vice versa for years and had grown weary of it. She decided instead to state the facts and have Wilhelm take it however he saw fit. ‘He gave up his rights and citizenship. Everything, really. His entire life belongs to Taki. They’re bound until death.’

She couldn’t help the mischievous smirk.

‘Not unlike us, my dear.’

Wilhelm bristled.

‘You’re not my property.’

‘The law sees it that way,’ she pointed out.

He fell silent at that.

‘And anyway, I meant it the other way around; you’re _my_ property. I keep you around to lift heavy furniture.’

She was glad to see his jaw twitch and a rare smile cross his face. It occurred to her, like it had occurred to Taki, that he and Taki were similar in a few ways.

Wilhelm, meanwhile, was still trying to make sense of a situation that was strange no matter how he looked at it.

‘So Klaus is at Reizen’s beck and call. He has to obey all his commands. No rights or nationality. Or family,’ he extrapolated, confirmed with a curt nod from Claudia. ‘So why did Reizen let him come all the way out here? And then come with him, on top of that?’

Claudia beamed at him.

‘Exactly. I think you're finally getting it.’

She picked up the basket of laundry on the table and left the kitchen before her husband could process properly. He spared another glance out the kitchen window. They had drawn close enough for Wilhelm to see Reizen say something that made Klaus grin widely.

A small cloud of suspicion formed in the corner of his mind. One that he woefully misinterpreted.

He followed Claudia into the bedroom where she was sorting the clothes into piles on their bed. He hovered in the doorway, aware that he was about to sound like a fool but feeling the need to say it just to have Claudia make fun of him and lay his irrational thought to rest.

‘You seem to like him a lot.’

‘Who, Klaus?’ Claudia didn’t even turn around. ‘That’s hardly my fault. I was forced to share a childhood with him.’

‘I mean Reizen.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘Of course I like Taki. He left behind so much just to help Klaus take care of me. Plus he’s a sweetheart. I wish you’d get to know him.’

She sensed the strange quality of his silence. Over the years, she had gotten used to them and had learned to pick up on their variations. This one was new. She turned.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You – he –’

Claudia was shocked to see him red-faced.

‘You… seem to like him a lot,’ he repeated lamely.

Then it dawned on her.

‘You’re jealous?’

‘I – I’m not… I just meant –’

‘Of Taki Reizen?’

And to Wilhelm’s consternation, Claudia burst out laughing. She laughed for so long that she had to sit down.

‘What’s so funny?’

She was slightly doubled over, shoulders shaking, and Wilhelm was suddenly concerned for her spine. Still, the sound of her laugh was something he always secretly treasured. Even when he was down in the mines covered in grime and soot and the taste of copper was always on his tongue, the memory of her laugh would somehow bring to mind the golden fields outside their cottage.

‘What’s so funny?’ he repeated.

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Claudia, finally calming down enough to reply. ‘I wish I could tell you.’

* * *

There were little things. Things that Klaus had to be paying close attention to notice.

But some things jumped out at him without his having to pay any attention at all.

The next morning, Taki headed into the kitchen to see that Klaus had awoken before him again. He was by the chopping block, gathering the last few logs of kindling to bring inside before it rained. Clouds had gathered overnight and a rumble sounded in the distance.

Taki watched him for a few moments.

And then, with a resounding crack, thunder belted across the sky directly overhead. A few raindrops fell like emissaries. The silence hung suspended in the air for a moment before the heavens suddenly opened on them.

Klaus abandoned the few logs remaining by the chopping block and headed for the cottage, his hair and shirt already soaking. Taki went to the door and held it open for him as he ran up the back steps, arms laden with kindling that would need a little drying but was otherwise usable.

He glanced up when he saw that Taki was holding the door open for him. His smile flashed from beneath dripping bangs. Taki stepped aside to let him pass.

In only a matter of seconds, the rain outside became a torrential downpour.

And then, as Klaus slid past, Taki put a hand on his arm. Klaus stopped and looked down inquisitively.

With as little warning as the rainstorm, Taki curled his hand gently on the front of Klaus’ shirt, stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

For Klaus, the shock was a physical sensation. It started at the pit of his stomach and surged up into his throat before finally filling his head.

Taki's lips were soft and dry. But they had met Klaus' with deliberation, with real if gentle pressure, so Klaus knew it was really happening.

He threw the entire pile of firewood to the floor where the logs tumbled about noisily, rolling away into corners and even back down the steps into the rain. He pulled Taki to him in embrace so forceful that his feet left the ground and their mouths pressed together, hard, for long moments that seemed to meld into one another, one after the other, until the wetness of Klaus’ clothes became Taki's own.

The rain drummed louder on the roof. On the freshly mown lawn. On the golden fields turned grey under the clouds and the garden with its roses now dipping heavily. And still Klaus held Taki against him, pushed his lips open wider, felt the grip on his drenched shirt and wondered in an abstract sense about the welling in his chest.

When they finally broke apart, Klaus noticed that he was bearing most of Taki’s weight. In slight bemusement, he lowered him to the ground. They breathed heavily, foreheads still pressed together.

Unnoticed by either of them, Ori sprang lightly over the spilled kindling, shook herself and stalked out of sight into the house.


	26. Lives With Women

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!
> 
> For best results, I recommend reading one of the scenes below while listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkih54evUs). You’ll know which scene I’m talking about when you get there, and it’ll be discussed a bit more in the endnote :)
> 
> Hope you enjoy and thank you so much for reading!

‘Klaus?’

His voice brought Klaus out of his reverie.

‘Sorry, what?’

Taki gave him a strange look.

‘I need the list. For the groceries. I’ll meet you at Schmidt's.’

‘Right.’

He handed Taki the list that Claudia had written out and tried to avoid his eye. Taki had picked up on it that time, Klaus realised. He had to be more careful than that.

He had tried to catch a quick glimpse of Taki’s face as they pulled into town. During their first few trips, his nervousness had been patent. Now, however, he seemed perfectly at east. Almost content.

And then Klaus was suddenly taken with how Taki’s hair managed to take that shape. How it decided which way to fall and where to part. How it managed to feel like satin or silk no matter what time of day. He had just been about to reach out and touch it when Taki had spoken.

They got out of Wilhelm’s truck, a newer and more reliable double of Verner’s, and Klaus waved at the Fritzes across the road coming out of the butcher’s. He was always a little startled when he saw how Mrs. Fritz’ hair was streaked with silver and that her husband walked with a new stoop. He expected time to have stopped in the town since he’d last been there. He then realised he was a few short months away from turning twenty-seven.

Slow down, he told the gods.

Pay attention, they told him in reply. He turned in time to see Taki nodding at the grocer’s portly wife as he entered their store.

It was still difficult, even so many weeks on, to gauge whether the sleepy town had anything positive or negative to say about Taki’s presence. But the signs so far were largely in his favour.

After he loaded the truck with supplies from the grocery, Taki was about to enter Schmidt's dry goods store before he stopped to hold the door open for two teenage girls who appeared behind him, chatting to one another animatedly.

‘After you,’ he said.

The chattering stopped for a moment and both girls stammered their thanks.

Klaus, who was already inside, later overheard young, hushed female voices in the adjoining aisle wondering aloud about the handsome foreigner who spoke their language so fluently; whether he was just a tourist or if he had moved to town for good and how exciting it would be if it was the latter.

Klaus couldn’t help agreeing.

‘You’re making good impressions all over the place,’ he remarked as they pulled out of town an hour later, the back of the truck filled with groceries and hardware supplies.

‘Am I?’

‘Maybe I underestimated my countrymen.’ After remembering his recent scuffle with Wilhelm, he added, ‘Or maybe you're just a hit with the ladies.’

Somewhere behind his smirk, Klaus was suddenly imagining it. Taki in a completely different life. A life where they’d never met at Luckenwalde. Where Taki had gone home to win the war and then, a year or two later, married some pretty young thing. Lord and Lady Reizen. With a troop of stunning, dark-eyed children.

The life Taki would never have.

The irrational little tug of guilt Klaus then felt was identical to the one Taki had experienced months ago when he read Claudia’s letter.

It went away soon enough.

* * *

The colour in Taki’s room at the compound was always a dim, slightly unreal blue. The colour here, in the room that had once housed an ancient boiler, was gentler. More real. The moonlight fell past curtains Eva had chosen, infusing the darkness with something soft and silvery. Klaus smelled the unsanded wood of the floorboards. And flowers. Always flowers.

He sat on the edge of the old bed as softly as he could but the infernal thing protested at once.

Taki awoke to the sound of creaking and looked over his shoulder.

‘Klaus?’

He started to sit up.

‘What’s wrong?’

Klaus, who had expected him to ask what he was doing there, smiled gratefully.

‘Nothing. I just missed you suddenly.’

Without giving him time to reply, Klaus held his face and kissed him gently.

‘Can I get in?’

‘Klaus –’

‘I swear on Eva and Heinrich’s lives that I won’t try anything. I just want to be near you. For five minutes, tops.’

There was a silence.

‘Please?’

He waited in the still, grey moonlight. And took Taki’s reluctant half-sigh and averted gaze as a yes. He slid beneath the covers and pulled Taki to him, his back pressed against Klaus’ front, and slid his top leg between Taki’s.

‘Your feet are cold,’ he noticed. ‘Are you warm enough in here?’

‘I’m fine.’

He shifted until there was no gap whatsoever between their bodies and kissed the back of Taki’s neck, sighing in contentment.

Taki, meanwhile, tried to fight images of the past few days. Images of Klaus sweating under the sun, flashing him grins, wiping the back of his neck with the shirt he then casually discarded. He tried not to notice the strength of Klaus’ hold around his chest and waist. When he lost that battle and felt himself stiffening slowly, he then focused his energies on hoping Klaus wouldn’t notice.

He lost that battle too.

‘Are you okay?’

Klaus was worried about why Taki’s breathing was slightly more forced than usual. Why he had squirmed a little. Why his nod was a little too sharp to be placating.

It took him a few seconds. And then, momentarily forgetting his promise, he moved his hand to the front of Taki’s pants. And his eyebrows shot up.

The touch sent bolts of electricity through Taki’s body.

‘Klaus,’ he complained through gritted teeth, once again thankful for the darkness that hid his fierce blush. ‘You said you wouldn’t –’

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

Taki heard the smile in his voice and felt a small, familiar prick of humiliation. He was relieved when Klaus, through an immense force of will, moved his hand back up to Taki’s waist. He closed his eyes, hoping vainly that it would end there.

For several heated seconds, neither of them moved.

And then Klaus kissed his neck again.

‘If you want,’ he whispered carefully. ‘I could make you come. Just with my hand, from where I am. It’ll be quiet. If you say no, I’ll back off, I promise.’

 _No._ The word danced on Taki’s tongue. He opened his mouth.

But the sound of Klaus’ voice, which had become hoarse even in a whisper, combined with the solid length of Klaus’ body pressing against his, had made quick work of Taki’s ability to rationalise.

He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his face into the pillow.

Without wasting another second, Klaus’ hand slipped past the hem of his pants. Taki gasped when he felt the calloused palm around his cock. He felt Klaus harden somewhere in the small of his back.

‘You’re already leaking so much.’

The words, whispered roughly in Taki’s ear, awakened a different part of Taki’s body and he almost shivered.

He realised then that he and Klaus had switched liberally between languages when they were alone. And this was the first time in a long time that Klaus’ rich, heavy language was being used in a way that made him weak.

Klaus coated his hand in Taki’s pre-come and began moving it over the length of his shaft. Taki’s head arched back into his chest and a small moan escaped him.

So Klaus held his other hand firmly over Taki’s mouth as he stroked. The bed made a few creaks which Klaus felt out and learned how to avoid. He felt Taki’s rapid breaths against his skin and tried to stop himself from rubbing his own cock against Taki’s back.

‘Fuck,’ he summarised, resting his forehead against Taki’s shoulder.

Taki was lost yet again in Klaus’ hands. His mind was filled with the images that he had tried to fight earlier, combined with the swift, merciless grip on his cock, combined with the feel of Klaus’ breath on his neck. The hand on his mouth. The stiffness of the cock in his back.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Klaus asked, his whisper taut and raspy. Slow consonants, dragged out, dense with lust. ‘Are you thinking about my cock?’

He then succumbed to the strong urge to grind his hips into Taki’s back and didn’t pay any mind to the single loud creak from the bed.

‘Are you thinking about me being inside you again?’

Taki moaned quietly into his hand. Klaus sped up his pace.

‘Are you thinking about me fucking you hard, lying here like this? Hitting that spot inside you. Hitting it so hard that you –’

Taki came into Klaus’ hand, his come dripping over his fingers. Klaus felt him tense and buck slightly, his breath hot and wet against Klaus’ palm.

‘Taki,’ he said with a small grin and Taki felt his head spin again over the way his name rumbled from Klaus’ throat. ‘Look how much you came.’

He brought his hand to his mouth and licked the come off his fingers, trying to subdue his own cock that was undoubtedly soaking the front of his pants in pre-come.

In the room’s stillness, amidst the sweetness of release, Taki was relieved to reflect that Klaus had been right. Despite the whispered words and occasional complaints from the bed, it had all been surprisingly quiet.

Klaus tried to ignore his painfully stiff cock and tried to reflect on the past few minutes. He wondered if he’d just put his niece and nephew’s lives on the line or if Taki really had given him permission. At least he had pulled himself back from going any further. Perhaps the reticent fear of Wilhelm storming in on them had burrowed into the back of his mind.

Whatever the case, it was a treat to have a gasping, physically spent Taki folding against his body, drops of sweat coating his neck and face.

Then he heard a few mumbled words, none of which were fully resolved.

‘You… you’re still… you haven’t –’

When Taki looked over his shoulder, Klaus realised he could feel Klaus' need pressing tenaciously against his lower back. He thought of his recent promise and shifted away with a guilty chuckle, surprised and pleased that Taki cared at all.

‘I’ll live.’

Silence pressed on them again, like it had been hovering and waiting in the corners of the room. Klaus fancied he could hear Wilhelm’s snores through several walls and the intervening room.

Taki was warm in his arms.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured, eyelids suddenly heavy. ‘I should go back to the couch. Or I’ll fall asleep right h–’

He was silenced by the wholly unexpected feel of Taki’s hand on his cock. All thoughts of sleep were scattered and he inhaled sharply. It took him another moment or two to note that Taki was hesitantly trying to slide his hand past the fabric of his pants.

‘You – you don’t have to,’ Klaus breathed, more out of surprise and guilt than sincerity.

He felt Taki hesitate for a moment before drawing his hand back. Klaus wanted to strangle his conscience.

‘Unless you want to,’ he said tentatively. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing in the world I want more. But I don’t want you to feel like you… have to,’ he finished weakly.

 _Gods above, Wolfstadt_ , he thought with gritted teeth. _With lines like that, it’s a wonder you get laid at all._

Taki closed his eyes and slipped his hand past the hem, past the bristly hairs covering the base of Klaus' cock and held him in his palm. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so and yet, somehow, it felt like it was.

Klaus let out a long, tortured exhale.

Taki held him tighter and a small tingle ran up his spine at the reaction from Klaus. Breathing that was more haggard. The huge body behind him that tensed in anticipation.

As he tried to mimic the way Klaus had worked his hand over his cock, he began to realise that facing away from him had a great many limitations. So he turned. He caught a flash of golden eyes through the gloom before he felt for Klaus’ cock again and focused. Klaus had squeezed him at the tip and used the fluid to lubricate the rest of his cock, right to the base. Taki did the same.

 _‘Scheisse,’_ Klaus hissed.

Taki kept his eyes on Klaus’ cock, huge and slick with pre-come. He felt himself hardening again at the surreal thought that it had been inside him so many times that he had lost count.

And suddenly he had lifted off his pillow, wincing slightly at the creak of the bedsprings, and hunched over Klaus' hips.

 _Any moment now_ , Klaus told himself, his heart thudding erratically. _I’ll wake up._

When Taki lowered his mouth over the dripping head, they both flashed back to the last time he had done so. The last time he had done so like this, properly, of his own accord. Months and months ago. The night before Hans had shown up at the compound.

Klaus remembered his disbelief, which was the same now. The same desire to ram his cock deep into Taki's throat when the wet heat of his mouth enveloped him. The same restraint. He stifled a groan and covered his mouth with his fist.

Taki, in his turn, felt that same counter-intuitive sense of power. Power in the fact that the tall, intimidating, golden presence of Klaus von Wolfstadt was reduced to this beneath his touch.

He was too far away for any more whispered obscenities but the strong fingers running over the back of Taki’s head communicated Klaus’ intensifying pleasure.

The bed’s strained voice inhibited his pace and the fear of waking Wilhelm or the children was an added pressure Taki didn’t need. But, over the course of the next few minutes he managed, only once, to take Klaus all the way into his throat without choking.

That was the moment Klaus’ head fell back on the pillow and he came. The hand in Taki’s hair clenched hard enough to hurt but Taki remained where he was.

The taste of Klaus, like everything else about him, was strong and insistent.

* * *

When he pulled Taki up to kiss him, when he held him down on the mattress and forced one final squeak from the bedsprings, he tried to reconcile what had just happened with his memories of Taki from a year ago.

Taki, who had tearfully protested when Klaus licked the tip of his cock for the first time.

 _Don’t,_ he had begged. _You’ll get your lips dirty._

He had smiled then, just as he did now, and gathered Taki close to him again.

* * *

A few minutes later, Taki’s hand was braced on Klaus’ chest and his breathing had steadied. The emotion in him then reminded him of the mottled reflections of multi-coloured trees in a river not far from there.

They were both in danger of falling asleep – Klaus’ eyes were closed – but Taki couldn’t bring himself to break the spell.

His eyes travelled along the muscles of the arm that Klaus had thrown around him. Just below the hem of Klaus’ sleeve, he saw, even in the darkness, the small, raised patch of skin on his forearm, glossy with scar tissue.

Operation Hannibal. Taki remembered the sling. The brace. The month they had spent apart. The constant fear that news would reach him of Captain Wolfstadt’s death. And then, finally, the voice that called him from a hospital on the eastern front and brought him back to life.

_Master. We did it._

He traced the scar with the tips of his fingers. Klaus opened an eye.

Taki remembered Suguri saying the bullet had fractured the bone.

‘Does it still hurt?’ he heard himself ask.

Klaus raised his eyebrows.

‘Not even a little.’ His eyes travelled to Taki’s left side where his bullet wound would be pressed against the bed. ‘Definitely not as much as yours.’

After a pause, he whispered in Taki’s ear with a smirk, ‘We both have bullet scars. Kind of romantic, right?’

Only a split second after he spoke, his expression changed.

‘Although,’ Klaus said darkly, ‘if I had done my job properly, you wouldn’t have been shot in the first place.’

Hans flashed across both their minds at the same time. For a moment, Taki was in a small room that smelled like damp soil and the pain from his hip was rolling over him in constant waves, never receding completely, coming back in more vengeful swells.

Then time rewound and Taki was in his room at the compound, turning his back on Hans. Those last few moments before the world went black.

Time rewound again and Taki was on a platform in the square, unsheathing his katana before Klaus. Klaus, who knelt and watched with eyes that were somehow both resigned and pleading.

 _It’s my fault you weren’t there,_ Taki thought.

Klaus wondered if he was imagining it when he felt Taki burrow further into his hold. He didn’t know Taki was reliving the two months that they were separated after he had sent Klaus away. That he was reliving the landscape of heartbreak and guilt.

‘Where did you go?’ Taki whispered at length. ‘When I... after I... exiled you?’

The word was like a scar itself. Taki had, at first, tried to skirt around it but in the end had chosen to fall on the sword. He deserved it. He deserved to hear the word aloud, to remind himself of what he had done.

Klaus once again felt the echoes of the gong in his chest. That ringing hollowness of how much he had failed and how far he was from Taki. He brought himself to the present again, where he and Taki lay together in a bed in his cottage, before allowing himself to drift back to those few terrible months.

‘They uncuffed me on the other side of the border,' he began, 'and left me with the bike. Thanks for that, by the way,’ he added into Taki’s ear. ‘I had a feeling the bike was your order.’

Taki didn’t say anything. It had felt like the least he could do at the time.

‘I rode off and called the old man. Waited until your men turned back around. And then snuck back in over the border through a different town – the same one where I met the old man a few days before that. He was already back home but he made a few well-placed calls and got me through without papers. I’ve always suspected he had a thing for me.’

A brief smile, hoping the jaded old man was enjoying his retirement somewhere.

‘So,’ Taki reflected, ‘you were only out of the country for –’

‘About half an hour.’ He chuckled. ‘That’s got to be a record for disobeying your orders, huh?’

Taki swallowed, unwilling to ask but needing to know.

‘And… and then?’

Klaus indulged in the silky feel of Taki’s hair against his cheek before he went on.

‘I stayed there for a few days until the old man found me somewhere safer to lay low. A town closer to you, even though it was still hours away. I stayed in a little room above an old bar. The owner’s good friends with the old man and he had escaped the rat squad so no one knew he was working for the west. Not that he did anything important anymore, really, as he kept reminding me. Spies are only so useful after a war is over.’

‘You stayed there for two months?’

‘Pretty much. It was too dangerous for me to wander so I just waited. I used the wireless Haruki rigged up for me. The compound was out of range but I kept an ear on the news.’

The hallway outside his room, the little brass numbers, the striped pattern of the bedspread. The splotches on the ceiling above his bed that he’d memorised. The constant pull, the membrane that he could still feel linking him to Taki. The need to be with him and protect him.

Countered, always, by the knowledge that he would be no use to Taki in a prison cell. That he had to stay hidden until he was needed.

‘Two months of push-ups and sit-ups and listening to the radio and eating Makimura’s godawful food. Forget being a spy, his shitty excuse for tonkatsu should have run him out of the country.’

Taki realised he was both trying to and trying not to read between the lines. He tried to see through to Klaus’ pain, knowing he deserved to feel it.

Klaus paused for a moment, his good humour again trickling away between the cracks.

‘And then I heard what happened. To you. And all the Reizens. I got on the bike and left.’

Snow whipping past him as the cold, iron grip on his windpipe threatened to drag him beneath the ground.

‘A few hours later, the kid managed to intercept my wireless. And the rest you know.’

A long silence followed.

Klaus wondered if he had said too much. Or too little. Taki was lost to him for a while.

‘I'm sorry,’ he finally heard murmured into his chest.

Klaus took a slow breath.

‘You've already apologised. And it wasn't your fault.’

_If I could kill him twice, I would._

He then thought about something that had occurred to him many times as he lay in his bed in exile, memorising the shapes of mildew on the ceiling. He wondered if it was time, now, to bring it up again.

‘And you know,’ he began cautiously. ‘The first time you made me your knight, I wasn’t exactly... I mean, I wasn’t true to you, was I?’

The words inspired a different kind of silence.

They hadn’t spoken of it since Katsuragi. Since the Duchess and Berkut. Since Klaus had been laid bare, shaken to his core, only to have Taki tell him that he knew, that he had always suspected, and that he had long since forgiven him for it.*

‘And so, it was fated, in a way. That you should strip me of my knighthood. You didn’t do it when you found out that I was a spy and that I had lied to you. You had every reason to exile me. Even kill me.’

An awful, metallic taste in Taki’s mouth at the thought. He lifted his head and met Klaus’ gaze in the darkness.

‘But you didn’t,’ Klaus went on. ‘I deserved it, but you didn’t.’

‘Klaus…’

Taki touched his face, unsure of what he wanted to say, knowing he only wanted to put this strange, previously unspoken demon to rest.

‘I didn’t deserve to be your knight in the first place,’ said Klaus, his voice low.

Taki’s heart skipped a beat.

_…something I’ve suspected for a long time. That you deserve more than me. That I’m not whatever it is you’ve been searching for._

Hearing his own fears reflected in Klaus’ words was sharp and unsettling.

‘Of course you –’

‘Not the first time,’ Klaus clarified gently. ‘And then, after everything happened, you asked for me back. It felt like I had… proved myself. And the second time, on the pier, neither of us hid anything. And it – it meant a lot to me. Being able to say those vows again. You know?’

Silence. Klaus pressed Taki’s hand to his heartbeat.

‘It all worked out,’ said Klaus, searching out his eyes. ‘In the end.’

Taki tried to filter through it. There was too much there. But it seemed like Klaus had spent enough time thinking about it. And there was no need, there would never be a need, for him to know about Taki's own quiet demons.

‘I suppose it did,’ he said uncertainly.

They stared at one other for a long time afterwards until eventually Taki forced himself to look away, caving to the irrational fear that it was too strong, whatever it was between them, and that it would awaken something from the depths of the Earth.

* * *

Taki awoke the following morning bathed in sunlight. He heard the sounds of Eva and Heinrich playing on the lawn and realised he had slept in.

And that Klaus was still pressed against him, fast asleep. Taki felt another surge in his gut at the sight of the hair that had fallen over his eyes. The eyebrows drawn into a soft frown even though his lips seemed to be smiling slightly.

He sorely regretted having to wake him.

‘Klaus,’ he said, his tone caught somewhere between urgent and gentle. ‘Wake up. You have to go.’

Klaus slowly came to and stretched.

Then, far too quickly for either of them to do anything about it, the sound of small feet echoed down the hall straight towards Taki’s room. They braced for Heinrich or Eva to burst through the door and stare at them wide-eyed.

Instead there was a demure knock on the door.

They exchanged a look.

‘Yes?’ Taki said uncertainly.

‘Good morning, Taki!’ called Eva’s voice. ‘Papa asked me to ask you if you know where your dog has gone. I told him you don’t have a dog. But he told me you do. How come I haven’t seen one? Is he big? Do you think he’ll want to eat Ori?’

A small pause followed this unexpected tirade.

Though he knew he ought to feel slighted on both his and Taki’s behalf, Klaus found himself struggling not to laugh.

‘I, uh –’ Taki tried.

‘Papa says he needs your dog to help him with the new combine machine. I didn’t know dogs could be that smart! My friend Lena’s dog just barks all the time.’

‘Wilhelm will hear plenty of barking from this dog later,’ Klaus whispered while Taki tried to quieten him.

‘I’ll be out in a second,’ he said to Eva. ‘Tell your father he – I – tell him we’re coming.’

‘Okay!’ Eva said brightly. Her footsteps receded.

* * *

The combine was a recent purchase and one that Wilhelm was particularly proud of. It would cut harvest time to a fraction of the time taken for threshing by hand or with the horse-driven binder. But he had bought it second-hand and needed some touching up. At the moment she trundled about on her huge tractor-like wheels but refused to do any actual threshing.

On Claudia’s urging, and mostly to make it up to her for what had happened a few days ago, he had enlisted Klaus’ help. Klaus, in turn, brought Reizen, claiming that he was a better hand with large machines than he was. Wilhelm cast a doubtful glance at his small frame and pale skin. The easterner looked like he had never even cracked open the hood of a car.

And yet, in only a few minutes, he was struck by the breadth of Reizen's knowledge and the acuteness of his instinct. After a brief rundown of how the combine worked – the grain elevators, the slide shute, the bagging platform – suddenly Reizen had made several enlightening suggestions how they might start trying to knock her together.

Klaus watched Taki proudly for a few moments before leaving the two of them to their large, rusty child.

Within a few days, Wilhelm was astonished and almost dismayed to discover that he preferred Reizen’s company to Klaus’.

Then again, he reflected. That wasn’t really saying a great deal.

* * *

Hearing from Klaus that he had made a good impression in town stayed with Taki in an almost infantile kind of happiness. From that day on, he tried to discreetly analyse the looks of people he passed, wondering what Klaus had seen.

It occurred to him that the looks he received were no different to those he was already used to in his country. Even though those from his own people were fuelled by reverence rather than curiosity, he realised that he would always stand out, in some way, no matter where he went. It was part and parcel of who he was. The gods had decided that for him long before he was even born. For some reason, the thought filled him with a temporary but poignant sadness. Again, it was something he never showed.

And it was something that was easy enough to forget when Klaus hummed along to the number playing from the truck radio and reached over to squeeze Taki’s knee.

In town, Klaus went to the post office and Taki entered the small hardware store for the first time. He nodded at the owner who stood behind the counter, talking to the man Taki recognised as the town sheriff.

He brought a few cans of paint to the counter and asked for a cartons of eight-inch nails from the rack behind the owner.

‘They’re not available,’ the owner said curtly.

Taki glanced at the full rack behind the counter and then back at the owner. He was in his fifties, hair combed and oiled carefully and his eyes were steady and unblinking. Taki felt a familiar swell of anxiety and defiance.

He stared back resolutely.

‘I’ll just take the paint,’ he said, his voice steady.

The owner made no move to bag the cans.

‘Maybe I wasn’t clear,’ he said after a small pause. ‘We don’t serve your kind here. Commander,’ he added icily.

Above all, it was the silence from the sheriff that unnerved Taki. He leaned his elbow against the counter, watching the exchange passively under half-lidded eyes, the black handle of his gun shining in its holster.

And then, in place of his usual defiance or sense of injustice, Taki felt foolish for the first time. Naïve. Breathtakingly myopic. It occurred to him only then, in a small hardware store, that for the past few weeks he had managed to con himself into feeling at home in that world. In Klaus’ world.

The breadth of his stupidity overpowered his anger. He left the store without another word.

* * *

Klaus’ grin vanished when he saw his face.

‘What’s wrong?’

Taki went to open the door of the truck, feeling more like an impertinent child by the second.

‘Nothing.’

Klaus put a hand on the door Taki tried to open. He was shocked to see Taki was near tears.

‘What happened?’

He then noticed Taki was empty-handed.

‘Where’s the paint?’

‘They ran out.’

Taki stood still, pulse hammering in his ears, waiting for Klaus to move aside. Knowing he wouldn’t.

Klaus’ instincts honed in. ‘Did someone say something to you?’

When Taki didn’t reply, Klaus was nearly overwhelmed by the anger that flooded his veins.

‘Who was it?’

‘No one said anything.’

And so Klaus tried asking again, only to be met with more denial. It was suddenly like there was a solid wall between them. Taki refused to tell him and Klaus refused to budge.

As the pointless minutes lengthened, Klaus felt his exasperation with Taki slowly replacing his anger over whatever it was that had been said. No matter how many times Klaus tried to get through, he was only met by more of Taki’s obvious lies.

‘Fine!’ he said at length, in a near-shout. ‘I’ll ask the pricks myself.’

He headed off in the direction of the store and Taki felt a surge of unexpected, irrational resentment like a whiplash.

‘Just _leave it_ , Klaus!’ he snapped, his voice loud enough to make a few passers-by turn and stare. He was even more frustrated to find he had switched back to his own language. ‘This isn’t another chance for you to show off. I don’t need you to rescue me every time. How weak do you think I am?’

Klaus took a second for that outburst to sink in and then he stormed back. Taki raised his chin. Though it had been a very long time since Klaus had seen that gleam in his eyes, the frown, the hard line of his mouth, it was only too familiar. And it brought forth a desire to hurt that was just as familiar.

‘Clearly you’re weak enough to just lie back and take whatever anyone wants to give you,' he said, realising too late he had lost control over his words. He heard the ugly sexual innuendo only after the words left his mouth.

Taki blinked and looked at him in mild shock.

_Shit._

‘I –’ said Klaus, trying to backtrack. ‘Look, I didn’t mean –’

Taki’s stare grew cold again. Klaus could almost feel him retreating behind his old barriers.

‘Taki, just – just tell me what happened. Please.’

He felt like he was seeing Taki through a small circle. Through the wrong end of a telescope.

After a few more seconds, Taki turned away.

And it was there, on a sunny street in the middle of a country town, when the patience Klaus had carefully nurtured threatened to break and he felt everything bubble up. In a way that he hadn’t experienced since he and Taki fought in his room all those months ago.

 _Talk to me!_ he wanted to yell. He imagined grabbing Taki’s shoulders and slamming him against the truck, watching his look of wide-eyed shock. Even fear. _Have I not done enough yet? What more do I have to do?_

Instead, they climbed silently into the truck.

The ride back to the cottage was icy, with neither of them willing to apologise or be the first to break the silence.

* * *

As the day wore on at the cottage, they had largely managed to avoid seeing one another and the pinpricks of shame started to set in on Klaus. When his anger – anger that he hadn’t learned to control even after twenty-six years – began retreating, he saw clearly in its wake.

He realised his frustration with Taki almost always came from somewhere else. First from Hans and his lies. And now from whatever had been said in the hardware store that Taki was refusing to tell him. Words that Klaus should have been there to protect Taki from. And in the end, his own words had probably hurt more than any of theirs.

So he dropped the trowel into the soil and headed up the back stairs.

‘Have you seen Taki?’ he asked Claudia when he came into the living room.

She was back in the wheelchair after a flare-up that morning, but was in relatively good spirits. So much so that she hadn't picked up on the tension between Klaus and Taki. Ori sat contentedly in her lap, turning yellow eyes on Klaus.

‘He’s outside with Wilhelm. I think they’ve nearly got the combine working.’

Klaus stared out the window over the wheat field and thought he spied their small figures on the combine’s humped back.

He then remembered a rain-drenched train station when four bigots were struck dumb by Taki's grace and eloquence. He thought of how Taki had somehow mollified even Wilhelm’s staunch, misguided patriotism. And the shame hit Klaus even harder.

That evening, he apologised quietly. Taki, in his usual way, told him it was fine. And his eyes, soft again, possibly even contrite in their turn, communicated the apology he was unable to deliver. For being weak. For having lied. So Klaus took his hand and kissed it. He reminded himself that he had vowed to battle through the cold currents.

A few hours before that, when he was still staring out the window at the combine in the distance, his lips curved into a wry smile.

‘You know,’ he remarked to Claudia. ‘I’m not over the moon about how much time Taki and Wilhelm are spending together. Are you?’

Claudia thought about what Wilhelm had said to her only a few days ago about Taki and laughed at how she was surrounded on all sides by half-baked, benign jealousy. She then found herself trying to recall another time in her life when she had laughed so much.

* * *

The new, unsteady peace between the three men in her home had lasted a week before Claudia jumped on the chance to capitalise on it.

‘I think we should all go into town next week. Get Rudi to take care of the kids for a night. What do you say?’

‘I say you’re too weak for gallivanting,’ Klaus replied.

‘Then you three can gallivant on my behalf.’

Klaus snorted at the thought of either Taki or Wilhelm doing anything of the sort.

‘Come on, Klaus. It’ll be good to get out of the house. And to show Taki a little western culture. Plus,’ she added with a sly look. ‘I haven’t even told you the best part.’

‘Which is?’

‘Heidi Reinhart is performing!’

Her excitement was left hanging.

‘Who?’ said Klaus, his tone carefully noncommittal.

She made a face. ‘Don’t be coy!’

Turning to Taki, she said, ‘Reinhart’s a local singer who became quite popular all over the country. She’s back for a little hometown performance.’

Klaus then shot his sister a warning look.

‘And Klaus over here,’ Claudia continued, swiftly ignoring it, ‘was convinced for most of his teenage life that he would marry her. He collected all of her records.’

From the rug in the middle of the living room where they were busy dissecting a magazine, Eva giggled and Heinrich screwed up his face at the thought of his hero uncle marrying, of all things, a girl.

Taki glanced at Klaus and was surprised to see a faint blush on his cheeks in addition to a self-deprecating grin.

‘Yeah, well,’ he muttered. ‘Things change.’

But somehow, through various cajoles and half-serious threats about going alone, Claudia ushered all three of them into a tailor’s shop and made them stand for suits, which ignited a hushed but heated argument over the counter when both Klaus and Wilhelm attempted to foot the bill at the same time.

And a week later, Heidi Reinhart stepped on stage to loud cheers. Honey-blond waves tumbled to her waist. Slender alabaster shoulders peeked over the top of a carmine red dress that judiciously followed her curves to just below the knee.

‘Goddamn,’ Klaus muttered under his breath.

Taki felt a laugh bubble up from his chest which he only just managed to suppress. Klaus caught his eye from across the table and winked, leaving him unsure as to whether his little utterance had been serious or not. Either way, Taki’s heart was inexplicably light.

He wondered if that partially owed to where they were. They had driven a little over an hour to a lakeside town which was locally famous for a large farmyard barn that had been turned into an almost-ritzy jazz club. Round tables draped with white tablecloths were grouped before the stage. Chinking glasses and laughter abounded. Women wore heels and backless dresses and the men were sleek in their suits and bowties. It was a scene that Taki, wearing an ivory shirt and jacket, had never thought he would ever be able to see, let alone be a part of.

And after Reinhart’s hypnotic, richly textured voice lulled everyone into a sort of stupor, she glided off stage and perched on the edges of tables to continue singing.

It didn’t take long for her to reach their table, where her eyes immediately honed in on the tall, dashing blonde with golden eyes. And suddenly, she was bending low near Klaus, whose cheeks were flushed again, possibly from the wine, and then, when her song was over and the band on stage struck up a slow, beautiful waltz, she was pulling Klaus to his feet.

Claudia cheered. Taki found himself laughing at the look on Klaus’ face. Even Wilhelm managed a tight smile.

Heidi took charge at first, sensing that her partner was somewhat reluctant if pleased, and she guided his right hand to just above her waist. But in just a few steps’ time, with a small glint in his eye, his hand slid a fraction lower on her waist and he spun her into the steps, twirling her away and smoothly reeling her back.

They fit together perfectly, Taki thought without the slightest trace of jealousy. He watched Klaus’ huge form in the perfectly cut ebony suit against which Heidi’s dress made a striking red splash. His gold hair gliding in and out of the lights. Her long curls falling over her shoulder and flicking back when he pulled her in, making her throw her head back and laugh. Even when the floor filled with other dancers, every eye in the room was drawn to them alone.

There was no jealousy. But there was the ever-present little thorn of guilt. The guilt when Klaus eventually bowed and kissed the back of Heidi’s hand.

Not now, Taki told himself.

And then he was startled to find himself politely turning down a pretty yellow-haired girl who had appeared at his side and asked whether he wanted the next dance.

* * *

‘I’m too heavy,’ he tried to protest, his voice strained and breathless.

Klaus flashed him a cruel, wolfish grin.

‘You’re perfect.’

And he was in, and Taki’s back and neck arched in response, the moonlight shining on his Adam’s apple, falling like liquid over his hair.

Klaus held him fast against the side of the boathouse wall with Taki’s legs spread and hooked over his forearms. The lake lapped at the pier beneath their feet. Somewhere behind them, uphill, the party carried on into the night. But at the water’s edge, it was only the two of them. The two of them and Taki’s desperate moans and Klaus' cock that was plunging into him.

 _There’s a pier near here,_ Klaus had said innocently as they left the barn. _And a little boathouse. If you want to get away from the noise for a while._

Taki’s trousers had been discarded and Klaus’ loosened belt was just barely holding his pants up around his hips. He licked the smooth skin at the base of Taki’s throat which had been revealed by undoing the top few buttons of his white jacket and shirt. Taki, in his turn, had wanted to undo Klaus’ bowtie and shirt but had lost his nerve, and then run of time when Klaus lifted him and pressed him hard against the boathouse wall.

‘Ah… ugh! Oh, Klaus…’

First, Taki threw his arm up behind his head against the weatherboard, trying to find a grip, something to counter the force of Klaus’ cock and the swiftness with which his sensibilities had abandoned him. Then he discovered the only thing he could hold onto was Klaus himself, so he clung to his back, to the black fabric of his jacket, and submitted completely. He felt their connection in a place that seemed both within him and outside him.

_Yes._

Taki tasted wine – for only the second time in his life – when Klaus drew back and kissed him and the red, bittersweet, forbidden flavour danced between their tongues.

_You feel so good._

Moans and unspoken thoughts, all muffled against Klaus’ mouth.

_Yes! Don’t stop. Klaus…_

* * *

A few hours later, on the drive back to the cottage, a tired and happy Claudia fell asleep with her head on Klaus' arm. Without her, the other three had nothing much to say to one another. Wilhelm carefully carried her out of the truck and turned once, briefly, over his shoulder to lower his chin in goodnight.

Taki was tired but Klaus told him to wait for a moment as he opened the cabinet near the couch and took out a huge gramophone that had gone out of date some ten years prior. He then fished through the few records that had been stacked near it, wondering if any of his old collection had made it to the cottage, and his face lit up.

‘Only one,’ he said. ‘But easily the best.’

There was a single dusty amber lamp on in the corner. The house fell silent around them before he lowered the needle. Heidi’s voice filled the room again, scratchy and weathered and somehow even more beautiful coming through the fluted speaker. Klaus held Taki’s hand to his chest as the piano chords sounded softly.[*](https://youtu.be/zZkih54evUs)

 _Nimm meine Hand,  
Nimm mein ganzes Leben auch_.

And they waltzed so slowly they were barely moving. They were like that for minutes that felt like years, Taki's head on his chest, Heidi’s sultry laments thrumming to Taki’s own guilt and love. Love above all else. And Klaus only smelled roses and thought about how he can’t help it, can't help any of it, least of all falling in love. Take my hand, he echoed in silence. Take my whole life too.

* * *

Earlier that night, after Klaus danced with Heidi Reinhart and led Taki out of the barn, he laughed loudly at the bizarre and wonderful way his life turned out. He was pleasantly buzzed from the wine, from the dancing and, above all, from the fact that Taki was beside him and smiling.

‘You saw my hands the whole time I was with her, right? They didn’t go anywhere they shouldn’t have.’

He was pulling out all the stops to keep Taki’s smile on his face. So far, it was working.

‘Would it kill you to be jealous for once, Commander? I’m trying my best here.’

His words inadvertently conjured the prickly, awful jealousy Taki had once felt over Klaus’ past with Hans. Not even that memory was enough to dampen Taki’s mood that night.

As they walked, Klaus’ eyes drank in Taki’s suit appreciatively. He took a final drag of his dying cigarette and flicked it away.

‘You look damn good in white, by the way.’

_I can’t wait to tear it off you._

They walked down the steady incline towards the tall pines, between which the boathouse loomed on the edge of the dark lake. Klaus felt like it was only yesterday that he and Claudia had raced down that slope to be the first to lay their hands on the cracking plaster of the boathouse.

‘Claudia’s doing well,’ he said, thinking of how her hair had escaped her bun when Wilhelm very carefully guided her through a spin.

‘Thanks to you.’

‘And you,’ Klaus pointed out.

Taki took the compliment silently.

They were thrilled, at times overwhelmed with a sort of numb relief that recalled her gauntness and frailness only a few short weeks ago, about the fact that she appeared to be on the road to recovery.

And yet.

‘Dream’s about to end soon, isn’t it?’ Klaus said vaguely as they picked their way over roots.

Taki’s smile flickered and Klaus kicked himself. He was right, but there was no need to bring on reality any more quickly than it was heading for them.

So instead he thought about Heidi’s bright, seductive smile. The softness of her hand and waist. He thought about the hypothetical Lady Reizen. Taki as a doting father.

‘We could have done it, couldn’t we?’ he mused aloud, hands deep in his pockets, as they strolled onto the pier. ‘If a few things had happened differently, we might have gone off and had regular lives with women and kids and all the rest.’

Taki said nothing. But his heart pounded. He wondered in how many different ways, large and small, now and in the future, he would be confronted with all that Klaus had given up for him.

Then Klaus, hands still in his pockets, bent down and kissed him on the cheek. Taki looked up in surprise.

‘How lucky are we?’

* * *

Time passed strangely after that.

Taki felt as though the final days were being whipped away from beneath his feet. At the same time, he felt certain moments drag on. Old moments like Klaus pressing him against the wall of the boathouse. The dusty amber lamp in the corner of the living room. The night Klaus climbed into his bed and their words built knighthood and pledges and old mistakes into real, living shapes in the darkness above them.

And new ones. The day he and Klaus sat apart between the long, golden wheat stalks and Klaus described his first ever take-off with a look in his eye that never failed to draw Taki in. The day Klaus had kissed his temple without realising Eva was in the room and she had only smiled and returned to her colouring. The day the sound of hooves made Taki turn from where he was hanging up large white bedsheets and saw Klaus riding over on a gleaming chestnut mare he had borrowed from Verner.

‘Ever ridden one of these?’ he had asked as he drew up alongside and Taki craned his neck up, shielding his eyes from the sun.

‘Yes.’

The first time he had ever mounted, Suguri had sometimes let a young Taki take the reins when they trotted to the border of No Man’s Land and back.

Klaus sighed.

‘Should have known.’ He reached down a hand. ‘I have yet to find something you can’t do.’

Taki was just thinking the same of him when Klaus took his outstretched arm and swung him onto the mare’s back.

And more moments still. As though every day, Taki would stumble onto a new side of himself he hadn’t known existed. Sometimes he would find he had wandered onto a bed of small thorns; times when it overwhelmed him to look at Klaus and he would turn away and hope he had only imagined the flicker of hurt on Klaus’ face.

Far more frequently, however, he was grateful to find moments that anchored him to a world he had seen for the first time and fallen for almost as completely as he had fallen for Klaus.

* * *

Despite the whimsical ebb and flow of time during those last few days, in reality, it was only a week after Klaus kissed his cheek in the moonlight that found them both on a train, speeding back to the east.

When the golden fields passed by him for the last time in Wilhelm’s truck, Taki felt a lead weight in his heart which he carried throughout the journey home. A weight that was only made lighter by the fact that his hand was firmly in Klaus’ almost the whole way.

For Klaus, Taki’s closeness was so tangible, his heart so within reach, that he almost didn’t mind it when they crossed the border and his master’s hand quietly slipped away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Klaus and Taki’s conversation about knighthood is a combination of canon and possible future canon and headcanon. Canon is the part where Klaus was still working for the west in some capacity when he pledged himself to Taki. Possible future canon is the part where Klaus’ betrayal is revealed explosively to Taki by Katsuragi of Home Affairs (could be wrong about this, though). And my own headcanon is the part where Taki always suspected Klaus had lied to him in the beginning but he didn’t care because of how much he loved Klaus (aww!) and because he suspected that Klaus had come to care for him too – enough that Taki knew where his true allegiance lay. The gold kernel at the heart of any double agent’s lies, as Hans put it.
> 
> On a lighter note, Heidi Reinhart is a shameless rip-off of the very real Haley Reinhart (whom I will fight Klaus to get to). Please, if you haven’t already, listen to her husky, sultry, could-be-1940s-if-you-pretend-hard-enough rendition of _[Can't Help Falling in Love With You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkih54evUs),_ which is the record that Klaus and Taki are dancing to in the light of a dusty amber lamp.
> 
> Also, for a little visual of their tailored suits, here’s [Taki in white and Klaus in black.](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/63/7b/e2/637be25032a2dea08120bc36e34d162a.jpg) [UPDATE: Here's [a better one. ](https://www.google.com.au/search?safe=off&client=ms-android-optus-au&biw=360&bih=265&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=hyaHWbFPhp_SBI6Uh6AH&q=klaus+von+wolfstadt&oq=klaus+von+&gs_l=mobile-gws-img.1.0.35i39k1j0l4.20328.23299.0.24523.18.18.0.0.0.0.361.4122.0j2j14j1.17.0....0...1.1j4.64.mobile-gws-img..12.6.1663...0i67k1.K1AwCSkImrw#imgrc=Jqldou1sq5A89M:)]
> 
> Thank you to Georgia for shirtless Klaus doing chores. 
> 
> And finally, a grateful credit to Hanairoh for the German sex talk idea and her help with other Germanisms - would you please stop being good at everything?
> 
> PS In case that ending was misleading, we’re not done with Part 2 yet, nor with the golden fields Taki has fallen in love with :)
> 
> PPS If you’re reading these words, please know yet again how much it means to me that you’ve followed the story this far. Thank you so much, and I really hope you’ve enjoyed our boys Xx


	27. Little Master

Ryoumei Fukushima was starting to worry. At first, he had chalked it up to some kind of post-combat trauma. Haruki had, after all, been to No Man’s Land. He had seen things that no other cadet had seen. And he had the medals to prove it. Although, as Ryoumei reflected, he never made much of a fuss about the medals. He seemed to care a lot more about the gun which the Saxon had apparently given him as a gift and which Haruki now openly cleaned and cared for.

But when the weeks passed and Haruki's general moroseness lifted only in small bursts – whenever Ryoumei cracked a particularly offensive joke or when he occasionally joined in a game or two on the courts – Ryoumei wondered if he should talk to one of the lieutenants.

Instead, he talked to his friends. He brought up Haruki's strange behaviour as they sat on the edge of the ashphalt court and tried to catch their breath. The basketball rolled off unnoticed towards the other edge of the court. There were only seven cadets left at the compound and six of them were there, trying, as best as fourteen-year-olds could, to psychoanalyse the one who was absent.

‘You know what he reminds me of?’ said Makoto.

‘A zoo animal that doesn’t move?’ Ryoumei offered, remembering the few other times Haruki had sunk into a similar state.

‘He reminds me of Ao last year after he got dumped by that girl.’

‘Hey, shut up,’ Ao countered.

Ryoumei snorted.

‘We haven’t been around girls for over a year,’ he pointed out.

‘Don’t need to remind me,’ Ao sighed.

‘At least we’re going home tomorrow,’ Makoto said. ‘He’ll snap out of it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ryoumei doubtfully.

But as Ryoumei walked back to his dorm, where Haruki would most likely be lying in bed, he was still thinking about the day a few months back when he called Haruki a zoo animal. He then remembered, properly, the few other times he had seen Haruki sink into a similar state. And he remembered why.

And so the next morning, when they were getting dressed for their final day at the Fifteenth Armoured Division, Ryoumei tried to bring it up in his brazen, cavalier way.

‘This isn’t about your boyfriend again, is it?’

Haruki had heard him make the same joke before but suddenly his words were like a bitter wind.

‘Stop calling him that,’ he snapped. ‘It’s not funny.’

There was a startled silence. Ryoumei made a face as he threaded his belt through the loops.

‘It’s a _little_ funny,’ he said quietly.

_Especially if you react like that._

He then saw how Haruki had made an effort to hide his face behind his hair as he tied his shoelaces. So he sighed.

‘Look, why don’t you try me?’ he said suddenly, a little annoyed that his tone came out sounding gruff rather than supportive. ‘I might, I don’t know, be able to help. Or something.’

Haruki glanced up in surprise. The uncomfortable look on Ryoumei’s face made him feel abashed and grateful. And immediately ashamed of his outburst. He even, for a moment, considered confessing.

And then he came to his senses.

‘I can’t,’ he said, his voice quiet. ‘Sorry.’

He sounded genuinely apologetic, Ryoumei thought, watching him helplessly. He then shrugged, getting the sense that he had done all he could. They left the dorm together.

* * *

Two months, Haruki thought to himself angrily. It’s been two months and you’re still so ridiculously transparent that Ryoumei’s getting worried. Enough, already.

It ought to have been enough when he heard that Klaus and Taki had taken leave to go to the west. It ought to have been plenty when he heard a few weeks later that they most likely wouldn’t be back in time to see the compound in its final stages of wind-down. The thought that Haruki had most likely seen the last of Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt ought to have been a comfort. It ought to have been the most conclusive, definitive end to something he had been battling by himself for far too long.

And yet, all of that somehow made it worse.

* * *

It was just past lunchtime and the sun was out. The single cherry blossom tree in the compound had already started spreading its light confetti throughout the grounds.

He and Ryoumei reached the bottom of the steps of the main building, both holding wieldy stacks of documents to be delivered to Hasebe in the reception hall, and they took off at a run. Their commanding officers hadn’t thought about whether the cadets needed time to pack and so their last few hours at the compound were destined to pass by in a blur.

So much the better, Haruki thought, dodging officers and soldiers as they took off across the grounds. That way he would be too distracted to –

‘Watch out!’ Ryoumei called out, a split second too late.

Just as Haruki cleared the corner, he collided painfully with something that was also moving at great speed and was much larger than he was.

The breath was knocked clean from his lungs and he fell backwards onto his tailbone.

‘Ah, shit,’ Klaus muttered, seeing the stack of papers go flying and feeling his chest throb from the impact. Then he recognised the cadet he had sent sprawling and his face broke into a wide smile.

‘Haruki?’

From the ground, winded and dazed, Haruki blinked to try to gather his bearings. He idly registered gold hair and a tan coat but was far from convinced it was real.

‘Hey, kid! Sorry, I really knocked you back, there. Can you stand?’

He crouched and offered a hand. Finally catching up with what had happened, Haruki’s cheeks flamed red, not least because that pathetic little scene was exactly how he and the captain had met all those months ago.

‘I… uh…’

He raised a hand and was pulled to his feet in a heartbeat. All too soon, he found himself standing right beneath Klaus’ half-amused, half-scrutinising stare.

‘You okay?’

‘I – yes, sir,’ he said, realising he sounded stupidly breathless and feeling the heat claim his ears.

Strange, he thought to himself as his pulse hammered. Strange how accurate his confusing muddle of thoughts and reveries had been over the past two months. The captain's eyes really were that gold.

‘What are you still doing here? I thought all the cadets had gone home already.’

‘Uh… I – I mean, we – the –’ Haruki stammered, trying to look elsewhere and at Klaus at the same time. ‘The…’

Haruki heard himself. He was aware Klaus could hear him too, as could Ryoumei. And yet he couldn’t stop making imbecilic half-sounds. It was as though a coherent thought was lurking there, somewhere, but the cumulative effect of the past few months and Klaus’ sudden presence in his field of vision was all a bit much.

Ryoumei’s eyebrows were in danger of disappearing into his hairline.

‘Geez, kid,’ Klaus remarked with a grin. ‘I didn’t hit you that hard, did I?’

‘No – no, sir,’ Haruki managed.

Ryoumei finally came to his rescue.

‘Sir, a few of us volunteered to stay on for as long as the officers stayed,’ he said. ‘We’ve just been helping out with the wind-down and stuff.’

‘You mean stuff like delivering important papers that idiots like me send scattering?’ Klaus observed, glancing at the strewn documents that were being sidestepped by soldiers on their way to their barracks.

The sight of Klaus crouching again to gather up the papers finally knocked Haruki back to his senses. Ryoumei, whose arms were still full, watched him carefully.

‘No, it’s fine, Klaus-sama,’ he said, holding his hands out and bending low too. ‘I’ve got it. Really.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks, kid. I’m in a hurry too. Uemura’s waiting.’

_More importantly, there’s a half-naked Taki waiting in my bed._

‘When are you boys being sent home?’ asked Klaus, straightening again.

‘In – in a few hours,’ Haruki replied.

‘What, today?’ asked Klaus in surprise.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No kidding? We only just got back yesterday. There’s another coincidence. You know how I feel about those.’ He started to walk in the direction of the main building and called over his shoulder. ‘Come find me before you go, okay, kid? Don’t head off without saying a proper goodbye.’

Haurki’s ears rang.

‘Uh…’

But the captain had already taken off at a jog.

* * *

Ryoumei saw. At least, he thought he saw. He almost definitely saw that the Saxon didn’t see.

And so, in place of being able to understand what he thought he saw, he tried, again, to understand what Haruki had been through in No Man’s Land. Haruki had explained it enough times. But Ryoumei tried combing over the details again. Wondering what he might have missed. Wondering what Haruki hadn't told him.

Haruki’s ears remained red long after they delivered the papers and headed back to their dorm to pack.

* * *

The platform was a cacophony of sounds and smells. The stationmaster announced that the train was due to arrive within ten minutes.

Haruki followed Ryoumei’s perpetually messy hair through the crowd of officers. His arms were already straining with the weight of not only his suitcase but the four heavy cases of radio gear and tech that his commanding officers had been happy to send home with him. Their attitude towards the cadet bordered on a near-embarrassing deference after they heard of how his tech skills had helped save their commander.

‘You good?’ Ryoumei asked over his shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki gasped, fingers straining.

‘I see the others over there,’ Ryoumei said, spying cadet uniforms at the far end of the platform.

 _‘Kid!’_ a deep voice suddenly called from the opposite direction.

Ryoumei made a noise of frustration.

Haruki’s heart pounded in his ears as he turned. Sure enough, the captain was wading through the sea of officers, half a head taller than the tallest of them.

‘Don’t take long, or I won’t be the only one making boyfriend jokes,’ Ryoumei warned him. He couldn’t even be sure Haruki had heard.

* * *

‘You disobeyed a direct order, Cadet. I told you to find me before you left.’

The cases weighed heavily in Haruki’s hands and he lowered them to the platform as Klaus approached.

‘I’m – I’m sorry, Klaus-sama, I didn’t have time to –’

‘I’m kidding,’ Klaus said gently. ‘Anyway, if you’re shaping up to be the next me, you’ll have to disobey a few more orders than that.’

He bent down to pick up Haruki’s bags and cases. Haruki was mortified.

‘No, Klaus-sama! Please don’t –’

‘It’s okay, I got it.’

A thought occurred to Klaus. ‘Unless it's because you don’t want your friends to see me with you?’

Haruki’s mortification found a different source.

‘Of course I don't! I… I mean –!’ He heard the unintended result of the double negation and tried to correct himself as Klaus watched with a smile. ‘I mean it doesn't matter. I don't care what anyone thinks.’

Klaus raised his eyebrows a little. He was suddenly reminded of the day they met, when Haruki put up a valiant defence of Klaus against his fellow cadets.

‘You really don't care what anyone thinks, do you?’ Klaus realised.

Haruki shook his head.

Klaus eyed him fondly and found himself thinking of Taki. ‘Wish there was more of that going around.’

Evidently Haruki was also thinking of the day they met. ‘Plus, that's what you said, remember? On your bike that day. You said you do what you want and you don't care what people think. So...’

Klaus laughed.

‘Good memory. I should watch what I say from now on.’

He took the cases over to a nearby bench where three lieutenants immediately sprang to attention, saluted the captain and gave up their seats. Klaus was too tired to object and sat down, indicating that Haruki sit next to him.

Near-embarrassing deference from soldiers seemed to also have followed Klaus since the commander’s rescue. Haruki felt a swell of pride, even though an indignant part of him knew the captain had always deserved that kind of respect from his subordinates.

‘What’s with all the cases?’ Klaus asked after Haruki took a seat, feeling vaguely unworthy of it.

He looked at Klaus and noticed he seemed a lot more relaxed than he did a few hours ago. He wondered what had happened in the interim.

‘Radios and other tech,’ he said. He described what he’d been allowed to take home and why. He mentioned a few of the young engineering programs at cadet schools back home that his commanding officers had recommended for him.

‘Glad your talents are finally being appreciated, kid.’

‘Thank you, Klaus-sama.’

‘So where is home, anyway?’

‘A few hours north.’ He was relieved to find he was starting to sound like himself again. ‘It snows a lot. Hopefully the grounds aren’t that cold anymore.’

‘Grounds? Sounds like a big place.’

‘It’s… pretty big.’

‘Your folks must be excited to have you back.’

‘Oh. I guess so.’

Klaus looked at him.

‘My mother’s dead,’ Haruki explained. ‘It’s just me and my father.’

Klaus felt a twinge of something as he stared down at Haruki’s huge eyes and the small smile he must have practiced to placate strangers over his own loss. He realised how little he knew about the cadet.

‘And what’s he like?’

‘Who, my father?’ Haruki seemed surprised. ‘Uh… he’s okay, I guess. He served in the last war as a lieutenant colonel.’

Klaus let out a low whistle.

‘Lieutenant colonel? That’s one step away from Taki’s rank.’

‘Yeah. And he lost a leg in the war. So he says the mantle’s passed onto me. He always reminds me how our family has had a long history standing by the Reizens.’

‘He must have been proud when he heard what you did.’

‘Yeah, he was. He sent letters...’

Haruki trailed off vaguely. Klaus tried to imagine Haruki and his father alone in a large, cold house.

‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. Just me.’

‘So you’re the little master of the house?’

Haruki smiled in embarrassment.

‘I… I wouldn’t call myself… that.’

‘I guess not,’ Klaus agreed. ‘I don’t see you bossing around the servants.’

‘I don’t. They’re… sort of like my friends.’

He was worried at how pathetic it sounded and was relieved to see Klaus grinning.

‘That sounds more like you.’

A train wailed nearby and the sound of distant horse hooves slowly resolved into the telltale chugs. They fell silent as the big black locomotive pulled around the corner.

Klaus thought about how he had boarded a train from that same platform which Taki had brought to a skidding halt not thirty seconds later. He thought about how his hair had been soaked by rain a year ago as he took Taki’s hand and kissed it for the first time.

‘My life seems to be all about trains,’ he said mysteriously as he got to his feet.

Officers picked up their bags and stood closer to the platform’s edge. On the other end, Haruki spied Ryoumei and the others shouldering their bags and elbowing one another out of the way.

The train came to a noisy stop. Steam from the engine covered the bustle on the platform like a bright white mist. When Klaus looked back down, Haruki seemed upset again. His heart fell.

‘What’s wrong?’

Haruki couldn’t brave a glance up.

‘I might never see you again,’ he said in a small voice.

Despite himself, Klaus felt a spark of warmth. It was rare for him to hear words like that uttered in the open and unselfconsciously. He realised the kid had a point.

‘You know what?’ he said, again trying to keep his tone casual to lighten the mood. ‘About a month ago I had the same thought, and it made me upset too.’

At that, Haruki looked up, hardly daring to believe it.

‘It did?’

‘Yep. And,’ he added with a wink, ‘the fact that we both feel like that is the world’s most obvious sign that we’ll meet again one day.’

Haruki gave a tentative smile. ‘You think so?’

‘You bet.’

There was a pause as officers moved past them to board the train. Klaus eventually chuckled.

‘Ah, bring it in, kid.’

He drew Haruki into a hug, which the startled cadet returned after a few seconds.

‘Whether you think we’re even or not, there’s a life debt I owe you. And that Taki owes you.’

He stepped back and held Haruki at arm’s length.

‘And I don’t take those kinds of debts lightly. So just say the word and I’ll come running. Don’t worry about the commander, he’ll want me to.’

Haruki stared and blushed.

‘You got that, Little Master?’

In addition to the twinkle in Klaus’ eye, there was also a certain fierce glint that made Haruki nervous again. His stomach flipped.

‘Y-yes, sir.’

‘Go on, go find your friends. Hopefully the little bastards saved you a seat.’

Haruki chuckled at the thought of Ryoumei’s reaction if he knew what Klaus had called him.

Klaus was pleased he had managed to make the kid laugh, even if it was only at the last minute. He passed Haruki the last few cases through the train door once he climbed on board.

The train gave a creaking jolt and began to roll away. Klaus gave him a final wave and headed off down the platform, which was now almost completely empty save for himself and the stationmaster.

The carriage Haruki climbed into had long cleared the platform before Klaus remembered and turned.

‘Kid!’ he bellowed, hands cupping his mouth.

It took a few seconds, but a small figure was leaning out the window in the distance.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Still got my gun?’ Klaus called.

The kid hollered back just loud enough for Klaus to make out his answer. He grinned and watched until the train pulled him out of sight.

* * *

‘Well,’ Ryoumei commented as Haruki stepped into their compartment where all six of them were sitting. ‘You look like someone who just found out they're crapping gold bars.’

‘Shut up.’

But Haruki was grinning from ear to ear and Ryoumei was relieved. He moved aside so Haruki could sit between him and Makoto.

‘Oh!’ Haruki added, swinging his canvas bag to the floor. ‘I snuck these off the tray in the officers’ cabin.’

‘Ah, this is why we love you, Yamamoto,’ said Ao, leaning across from the opposite seat to grab a few dumplings out of the circular wooden containers.

‘What did he say?’ Toono asked as he dug in. His round eyes stared from behind his glasses.

‘Who?’

‘Captain Wolfstadt. You were talking to him on the platform, weren’t you? What'd he say?’

Eyes on his dumpling, Ryoumei chewed and kept his ears peeled.

‘Oh, not much,’ said Haruki off-handedly. ‘He was just saying goodbye.’

Everyone except Haruki and Ryoumei paused in the middle of mouthfuls. It took Haruki a few moments to notice anything out of the ordinary. He then glanced up into their silent stares.

‘What?’ he said warily.

‘He came all the way to the station just to say goodbye?’ Ao reiterated slowly. ‘To you?’

‘Uh… yeah.’

They stared at him. Even Ryoumei, who tried to float above the situation and look at it objectively, realised how unorthodox it was for an officer to do such a thing for a cadet.

‘That’s so cool!’ said Toono, finally breaking the silence.

Haruki stared out the window, trying to condense his emotions.

_Say the word and I’ll come running. Little Master._

He smiled and scratched the back of his head.

‘I guess it is.’


	28. War and Peace

_THE PREVIOUS DAY_

And we're right back in, Klaus thought, slipping a new cartridge into his gun.

He barely had time to put his suitcase down on his bed before Taki called a meeting for a report on all operations both on and off the base. In no time, he and Klaus were in a jeep bound first for the Mitzue Outpost.

On the first day, they made their rounds of the entire Reizen estate to make sure soldiers and equipment had been moved properly to their permanent stations. The officers in charge of the outposts fell over themselves when they saw the commander had arrived personally to oversee the transition. Klaus wondered how they would react if they'd seen the young prince kneeling on the grass to hose off Heinrich's feet before letting him into the cottage.

Later that afternoon, they were back in the jeep heading for a POW camp where the last few lots of political prisoners were being shepherded across the border in a swap. It was for this little mission that Klaus had loaded his gun, just as an added precaution.

His skin still prickled when Taki shook hands with the sandy-haired leaders of the west who stepped out of the prisoner transport trucks. They’re allies now, Klaus reminded himself. Only on paper, a small voice that sounded like Wilhelm piped up unhelpfully.

Still, the swap took place without incident.

On the drive back, Klaus cracked open the window of the jeep. It was a temperate spring day, with gusts of something cold lurking behind the warmth. Perhaps it was due to the intertia of their two months in the west, but Klaus found himself noticing more things about Taki’s country.

He had always supposed that he felt a few degrees removed from that country due to the fact that he was a foreigner. But now he wondered if it was something about the nation itself. Its beauty was less overpowering than that of the west, which was the type that demanded absorption. Klaus' country demanded sweat and love and toil. The east was, as in all things, more demure. Unassuming. It was a delicate beauty.

The difference was clear in the very way the springtime air felt on Klaus’ face. It was clear in the subtle motions of nature around them; the shivering, delicate bouquets on their generously drooping vine-like arms. Through the flower-bedecked trees, he caught glimpses of a light, ethereal chain of mountains in the distance; a colour that the artist had yet to fill in properly. He saw sakura-iced paddy fields zoom by, their surfaces quivering at the faintest breath.

All poised. All untouched. Klaus wondered if he was any closer to understanding it.

* * *

Towards evening, Taki was called away to the capital. The new interim leader of Eurote, who was visiting their nation and had just finished paying his respects to the emperor, had expressed a desire to see the young commander as well and believed the timing of his return from the west seemed to have been rather opportune.

Taki sat with his officers in the general meeting room and tried to figure out whether he ought to go.

With his feet propped up on the conference table, Klaus sighed in frustration. He and Taki were both exhausted. They had hit the ground running and hadn’t yet been able to catch up on their three days of patchy sleep on the train.

‘Taki –’

‘We have just enough officers in the compound to accompany you,’ Hasebe interrupted as Taki got to his feet.

Klaus did the same and held Taki’s coat open for him.

‘I’ll put a motorcade together,’ Hasebe was saying as Taki shrugged on the coat and they headed for the door. ‘They’ll want to publicise this for sure. I’ll double check if they’ve already organised a press conference.’

The building, like the grounds at large, were echoing and almost empty. Only ranking officers remained, and most of them would be gone by the following day.

‘You should –’ Klaus tried again.

‘They don’t want soldiers,’ Taki told Hasebe, barely hearing Klaus. ‘Strictly diplomatic. They want to keep any war connotations at bay. No guards or guns.’

‘Taki –’

‘Not now,’ Taki said brusquely over his shoulder.

The tone came from their past year. It cut across the months during which they had built something new together and Taki heard it only a second after Klaus did. He stopped and turned and Klaus saw his look of immediate regret.

Hasebe, who had also stopped, looked around to see what was keeping him.

‘Taki-sama?’

‘We’ll talk later tonight,’ Taki said to Klaus, his tone noticeably apologetic. ‘In my room.’

Klaus smiled.

‘I was just going to tell you to be careful,’ he said. ‘It’ll take another few decades for me to trust anything that comes out of Eurote.’

Taki looked at him for a moment longer before he nodded once. Klaus watched as he descended the steps out of the building.

He then kept Uemura company in the general meeting room and they watched the broadcast together a few hours later, both nurturing various amounts of mistrust.

The new leader, Minister Andrea Rossi, appeared beside Taki at a podium in the heart of the nation’s capital. Meiji stood in the background, looking serene and sanguine as usual. Rossi reminded Klaus very strongly of an aging lion. He was tall and gaunt with whiskers and potent eyebrows that were the same powdery off-white shade. None of that mattered as much as his slow, carefully doled out responses; ones that appeared to have been meticulously pieced together by others. He spoke of a future democracy for the people of Eurote. And yet Klaus could almost see the small string attached to each word. He wondered who was pulling them.

As expected, Taki fielded the reporters’ questions with replies that were short and gracious. But Klaus was relieved when he stepped off-stage. A part of him had been worried about the Euroteans' call for no guns or soldiers.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Uemura.

Uemura made a non-committal sound. He didn’t care much for politics unless the military was forced to intervene.

‘Anything's better than Mussolin,’ he observed succinctly.

* * *

Klaus went back to his room to shower and await Taki’s return. The water pressure and heat all but sent him off to sleep in the bathroom itself. Inevitably, his catnap in bed stretched into several hours. It was close to midnight by the time he awoke again. Cursing, he pulled the damp towel away from around his shoulders and walked across the grounds to Taki’s room.

Taki was asleep on top of the covers in his uniform with his shoes still on. Like he had waited up.

 _Idiot,_ Klaus told himself angrily.

He played with the idea of waking him. He imagined Taki’s sleepy gaze – possibly even a small smile if Klaus was lucky. He imagined the soft, firm skin of Taki's stomach beneath his uniform. He could already feel how Taki would arch into him as he moved his hand below his belt.

Instead, Klaus stood there watching him sleep. Then, as quietly as he could, he slipped Taki’s shoes off and undid the top few buttons of his jacket. He pulled the blanket out from under him and covered him with it. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, he ran a hand gently through Taki’s hair.

Although he fully planned to walk back to his room and give his master his first proper night’s sleep since they left the west, it seemed like only minutes later that Klaus lifted his head in the full morning light and heard the sound of the shower in the en suite being turned off.

 _Already starting to miss each other_ , that same unhelpful voice informed him. He swatted it away.

Taki stepped out of the bathroom in a fresh shirt. His hair was damp and hung heavy and dark about his face.

‘I fell asleep in my room last night,’ Klaus said thickly by way of apology.

‘It’s okay,' Taki replied. 'It’s good you got some rest.’

He picked up the coat that he had left on the armchair by the window. Klaus thought about how good he looked in it on screen.

‘What did you think of Rossi?’ he asked, sitting up against the headboard and rubbing his eyes.

He expected another wise, balanced response like those Taki had delivered to the nation. One that would put his entirely gut-driven dislike of the man in sobering perspective.

Taki took a moment as he buttoned down.

‘I don’t like him,’ he said simply.

Klaus smiled in surprise. He wondered whether he ought to be proud or worried about how much he was rubbing off on his master.

* * *

Towards midday, Taki and Klaus stood by their jeep with Hasebe standing a little further out in the field. Military engineers dotted the empty grassland outside the Fourteenth Armoured Division. The steady beeps of their detectors broke the otherwise eerie silence. The commander of the Fourteenth Division, Colonel Yagata, also stood nearby. In his hand was the intelligence gathered from the POWs that there were still approximately seven undiscovered mines outside his compound.

It was a scene much like the last time Taki had helped conduct landmine searches. Except, of course, standing behind him and to his left, was Klaus. Not –

‘Taki-sama, they’ve brought another POW, sir,’ a sergeant suddenly informed him.

Taki turned in surprise.

‘A POW?’

From the truck that had pulled up near their jeep, two privates jumped out, flanking a Western soldier who was cuffed at the hands and feet. He was brought to a stop in front of Taki. The sergeant who had spoken had been with Taki during their first mine sweeps. He now watched Taki expectantly.

And Taki understood.

It was a strange moment for him. He felt a flurry of emotions as he glanced between the sergeant and the POW. He wondered how on Earth to tell them that the only reason the POWs had been useful last time was due to the inimitable powers of one Hans Regenwalde. He wondered if it was regret and even remorse he felt, for the briefest of moments, when he felt the extent of Hans’ absence. His loss. He was suddenly very aware of Klaus standing a few paces away.

The soldier’s hair was so fair it was nearly white. Stubble covered his face and, despite his long months in internment, there was a tethered strength about him that made him seem intimidating even in cuffs. The sergeant announced him as Corporal Jansson, third in command of the platoon that had infiltrated the area before being taken prisoner by the Fourteenth Division.

A small silence fell.

‘I don’t –’ Taki began falteringly. ‘He’s not – he’s not of any use here.’

‘Give him a crack,’ Klaus suggested unexpectedly.

Taki turned to him. He leaned back against the jeep, hands in his pockets.

‘Why not? He’s here, after all. Maybe he’s had a change of heart since the end of the war. Miracles happen. Plus, he knows he's being sent home tomorrow, he won't jeopardise that.’

So Taki turned back and stared at the tall soldier doubtfully. He switched to Klaus’ native tongue.

‘Corporal, we have intelligence that there are seven mines unaccounted for in the area,’ he said. ‘You would be saving a lot of lives if you were able to tell us where your platoon buried them.’

He braced himself for a response much like the rest. Instead –

‘Of course, Commander,’ the corporal answered, civilly enough given the circumstances. ‘Whatever I can do to help.’

Klaus narrowed his eyes. Taki frowned.

‘You’re willing to help?’ he confirmed, suspicion lacing his tone.

‘Yes,’ the soldier replied. The wind brushed his pale hair across a narrow jaw and bony cheeks. ‘If you’re able to follow my instructions.’

‘Which are?’

‘Go back to whatever palace you came from,’ he said carefully, eyes wide as though eager to communicate his words. ‘And get fucked, you little pampered prick.’

To Klaus’ credit, the snap took place somewhere inside him. On the outside, his face remained perfectly composed. He simply shoved off the jeep, took out his gun and lashed the soldier across the face with it.

‘Klaus!’

Before Taki reached him, Klaus held out a hand in warning. He then yanked the stumbling corporal back to his feet and hit him once more. This time, his fist came away bloody.

Taki’s first instinct was to stop him. To order his men to restrain him. He recognised the look in Klaus’ eye. The wolf had emerged, the one that never lurked too far away from Klaus' every thought and move.

But there was something steadying about the hand that Klaus lifted. An intentness in his face that made him think that, perhaps, Klaus had it under control. And so Taki nodded once, as firmly as he could, to his men, who looked on uncomfortably.

Corporal Jansson, bleeding now from the brow and mouth and sagging against his transgressor, was forced onto his knees in front of one of the jeeps. He felt the barrel of a gun press against his head, pushing him into the jeep’s hood. The safety unclicked with a sound that rang out in the silence of the open air.

‘You… wouldn’t,’ the soldier gasped.

Colonel Yagata hurried over with a few of his men. Taki tried another reassuring nod, even though he knew he looked nervous himself.

Klaus ignored them all and crouched low behind the POW.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked in a low voice.

The corporal swallowed. With his head held in place by the gun, he strained his eyes to look behind him. He then mumbled something.

‘What was that?’ Klaus demanded, pushing his head harder against the hood.

‘You’re the – the Mad Dog.’

‘That’s right.’ Klaus’ voice was calm but contained a hint of a threat, like a distant, menacing rumble of thunder. ‘So you probably also know that no one controls me. Look, my own commander can barely control me. You're in deep shit, my friend.’

‘They’ll… they’ll court martial you,’ the soldier said, his breathing unsteady and the pain in his head rather profound. ‘If you kill me here, they’ll –’

‘Do you really care about me being court martialled, or do you care more about your knee?’

‘My –?’

Klaus abruptly removed the barrel from the corporal’s head and fired into the ground, less than an inch to the right of his knee. Everyone in the vicinity flinched, but none more than Corporal Jansson, whose few remaining shreds of dignity were lost to the wind. He whimpered and cowered.

‘Stand up,’ Klaus growled.

Shaking from the shooting pain in his head and the reticent fear of Klaus' gun, the soldier obeyed. Klaus remained crouching and took a handful of the soldier’s belt and slammed him back onto the ground. His knees hit the hard tarmac and he grunted in shock.

Then he gasped when he felt the barrel of the gun press painfully hard into the back of his knee.

‘Next time, I won’t miss,’ Klaus promised. ‘And for every landmine that you don’t tell me about, I’ll put a new hole in your leg.’

The corporal breathed hard through his nose, still remembering the crack of the bullet as it hit the ground. He felt the strange conviction that he had, in fact, been shot and that the pain was just slowly catching up to him.

Klaus made a sound of impatience and moved the gun away, only slightly, and fired again. That time, as the corporal cried out in shock, he could have sworn he felt the heat of the bullet brush by his leg.

‘Okay!’ he gasped. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you!’

Without easing the pressure of the barrel in the back of Jansson’s leg, Klaus turned and looked at Taki for the first time.

‘Can I get a map?’

* * *

Three days ago, as Klaus was out front saying goodbye to Verner and Rudi, Taki stood in the living room holding family portrait that had been propped up beside the radio. A young, uncharacteristically serious Klaus stared at him from beside his family. Claudia sat on the floor, turning to face the camera, her smile radiant. Taki saw the lines of Klaus’ mouth in Wolfstadt senior and Emmerich. And he saw something else of Klaus, something slightly more ineffable, in Beatrice. There was an intentness in their gazes that had eluded the rest of their soft-eyed family.

‘That was taken right before Father took us to your country,’ said Claudia, coming up behind Taki. ‘Must have been, what, eleven years ago now. Almost twelve. Incidentally, that was the same year I met Wilhelm.’ She beamed at Taki. ‘And the same year Klaus met you.’

Taki stared at his face in the picture. It was the face of the boy who wandered beneath the wisteria tree at the Reizen residence. The tall stranger who had lifted Taki in his arms without a second thought just so he could reach the swaying flowers.

‘Strange that he should look so solemn, isn’t it?’ said Claudia, looking at the photo over Taki’s shoulder. ‘He was a bundle of smiles back then, even more than he is now. It was a long time before I saw that serious look on his face more permanently.’

Taki met her eye.

‘After the first war,’ he deduced.

Claudia nodded sadly.

Taki replaced the photo. He hesitated.

‘He – he never told me about it,’ he said quietly. ‘About what happened to him and his men.’

Taki had read about that fateful final mission where Klaus and his squadron were shot down over enemy lines. He remembered being shocked as he held Klaus’ file in his hands. He had often wondered why Klaus had never brought it up. In fact, Taki had gathered more about it from Claudia’s hints over the past two months than he ever had before.

He didn’t know of Klaus’ decision. That his new master should have nothing to do with the pain of his past.

‘I’m sure he’ll tell you about it one day,’ she said, once again proving that she knew her brother inside out. ‘He probably just wants to spare you from that part of himself. He was…’ Claudia’s eyes changed at the memory. ‘It was frightening to see.’

Taki tried to imagine it. He thought he had seen Klaus at his worst. His pain. His debilitating dependence on drugs. The animal he turned into when he lost his mind. He wondered how in the world Claudia had been able to handle him, let alone help him.

‘But you know what’s amazing?’ she said, her face composed again. ‘You got him flying again. He vowed that he would never do it again, but he did it for you. That made me think maybe he’s finally ready to put it past him.’

Taki remembered his laugh crackling through the airwaves and wondered if she was right.

‘And look at me,’ Claudia added unexpectedly with a radiant smile. ‘I waltzed last week. I actually waltzed! And I haven’t seen that damnable wheelchair in days. You’re the bringer of miracles, Taki Reizen.’

Taki barely had time for a grateful, embarrassed smile before Claudia’s face transformed again. In the space of a few short seconds, tears sprang to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She covered her mouth with both hands as Taki blinked in shock.

‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she said quietly, her voice shaking.

Taki’s chest filled with an unfamiliar sadness. He returned the gesture and willingly folded into her embrace.

Outside, the children were faring no better than their mother. Eva once again wore her best dress and stood near the short front gate with her hands behind her back.

‘I tried to find Ori to say goodbye,’ she told Taki gloomily. Behind them, Wilhelm put his and Klaus’ suitcases in the back of the truck. ‘But she’s gone again.’

‘That’s okay,’ Taki assured her. ‘I’m sure you can tell her goodbye for me.’

Heinrich proved to be the most difficult of all. Taki and Wilhelm waited by the truck for Klaus to extricate himself from his nephew’s small but tenacious hold around his back and neck. Around Heinrich’s own neck hung a checked tablecloth that reached almost to the floor even from his height on Klaus’ back, but the adventures of Wolverine had taken a backseat to the more pressing concern of his uncle’s departure.

‘You’ve got to let go, buddy,’ Klaus said gently.

‘Why?’ Heinrich asked into the back of his neck, his voice small and miserable.

‘Because we’ll miss the train if you don’t.’

‘Why can’t I come with you?’ said Heinrich. His face brightened, suddenly seeing no flaw in his new plan. ‘I’ll come to Taki’s house! I’ll be quiet, I promise!’

Klaus tried not to laugh, inferring that it would frustrate his case even further.

‘Won’t you miss it here?’

‘No!’

‘Heinrich, that’s enough,’ Wilhelm said with an impatient sigh. ‘Come down, right now.’

Feeling the onsets of a tantrum, Klaus silenced Wilhelm with a look. He took a few steps away towards the yellow field with its little furry heads dipping in the breeze.

‘Want to know a secret, buddy?’ he said in a voice so low that only Heinrich heard him.

‘What?’ said Heinrich dejectedly, sounding very close to tears.

‘I think your mother needs you more than she needs anyone else.’

This brought about a ponderous silence.

‘I think without you, she’ll be really sad,' he continued slowly. 'So what do you say? When I’m gone, it’ll be up to you to take care of her. Think you can handle it?’

After a long pause, Klaus felt a nod against his neck. He reached for Heinrich’s small hands and found they came apart easily enough. He slid the child to the floor, changed his mind at the last second and tossed him once into the air, making him squeal and laugh.

‘One for the road,’ he said with a wink.

Heinrich clung to his mother’s skirts as they drove through the wheat field towards the dirt road. Eva stood on Claudia’s other side and all three waved as the truck disappeared from view.

A few minutes beforehand, as Klaus finally set Heinrich down and went to climb into the truck, Wilhelm cleared his throat in Taki’s general direction.

Taki was surprised to see his cheeks somewhat flushed and his eyes averted.

‘Reizen, I –’ Wilhelm began and Taki was suddenly wondering whether he was about to apologise.

He did one better.

He thanked him.

* * *

As Klaus crouched by the jeep behind the shivering POW, Taki found himself unable to look away from him, from his silence and fierceness. He thought of their two months in the west when Klaus’ hands were used to plunge into the soil or gently caress a stalk of wheat, not to curl around a gun. Like his home had been a balm that soothed the wolf. Soothed the pain of his past. A pocket of his childhood where his youth left him wild and unencumbered, not wild and uncontrollable.

Taki worried about what would happen to him now, surrounded yet again by uniforms and orders. He hoped the end of the war would make things better. He hoped that everything they had been through would be enough to keep Klaus happy.

Once the map had been marked, Klaus finally released Corporal Jansson back into the relatively safer hands of his guards. When Taki attempted to take the map and lead the military engineers to each marked location, Klaus put a hand on his chest and pushed past him.

‘Like I’m going to let you wander first onto a field of landmines.’

He then stood resolutely between Taki and the engineers as they worked at defusing each device they unearthed, as though he would be able to protect Taki with his body alone.

All the while, still balancing images of Klaus at the cottage against those of Klaus lashing a restrained prisoner with the butt of his gun, Taki found himself fighting growing anger with himself. He managed to hold his tongue as the final mines were located and put out of commission. He even maintained a stony silence that Klaus heard loud and clear as they headed home.

A year ago, he would have taken his frustration out on Klaus in front of his men. Now, he was at least somewhat better equipped. He knew where his anger came from. And, like so much else, it came from guilt.

When they got back to the compound, Taki called for a status report in the general meeting room while Klaus went to his shed to wash Jansson's blood off his knuckles.

He opened the door to Taki a few minutes later and smiled like a teenager aware he was about to be schooled.

‘I don’t torture my POWs for information,’ Taki started. His tone was cold but Klaus was surprised to hear a great deal of restraint.

‘Who got tortured?’ said Klaus as he closed the door. ‘I only saw a smart-ass corporal getting a little roughed up. And, you know, nearly pissing himself.’

‘If it got out, it could affect the POW treaty we signed with the leaders of the –’

‘Is it going to get out?’

‘It – that’s not the point, Klaus. You need to control yourself.’

‘That _was_ me controlling myself.’

Taki knew he was being serious.

 _Speaking of controlling ourselves,_ Klaus thought, watching him carefully, _why aren’t you letting me have it?_

‘What’s this really about, Commander?’ he asked, cocking his head just slightly.

Taki felt a little hot under the collar. He realised it had been a long time since he and Klaus were alone in his shed. The last time they were there, Taki had somehow convinced Klaus to leave him to go to the west. He stared at the floorboards and tried to figure out how best to deflect Klaus’ question.

 _I don’t want to turn you into a monster,_  he thought. _Not again._

Klaus grinned.

‘Is this you trying to thank me for helping you find those last few mines?’

Taki made a small noise. It was somewhere between acquiescence and frustration. A patented Taki sound, Klaus thought affectionately.

‘I suppose… I suppose we did find them,’ Taki said stiffly. ‘And it would have taken a lot longer if you… hadn’t –’

‘You’re welcome,’ Klaus said breezily, wiping his still-wet knuckles on his shirt. ‘You know I only did it to help, right?’

Taki stared down his smile. Feeling a strange mix of relieved and defeated, he exhaled and turned to go.

In just a few steps, Klaus took his arm in a tight grip and pulled him backwards into his chest. Taki’s pulse surged.

‘Actually,’ Klaus breathed in a low voice near Taki’s ear. ‘I did it because _no one_ tells you to get fucked but me.’

* * *

Five days, Klaus thought as he flung Taki onto his bed. Five days since they took advantage of an empty cottage and Klaus had held him against the grass in the rose garden.

Taki looked up and his body was flooded with that familiar apprehension. There was that same look in Klaus' eye. The one that had so callously made a prisoner buckle and tremble. The one that had dragged Taki to the floor of his room in the cottage. The one that had watched Hans lying still at his feet in No Man’s Land.

Again, Taki knew in the back of his mind that he had the power to stop him. But a small part of him was afraid to. And a different energy was taking over his body regardless.

He wondered if he would ever get used to the sight of Klaus bearing down on him as he lay prone in bed.

Klaus' lips found Taki’s neck first and his hands were already unbuttoning Taki’s coat, tugging at it impatiently.

‘It’s been a while since I tore that coat off you,’ said Klaus, flinging it to the floor. He slipped Taki’s suspenders free and they fell to his hips. His hands, still cold from the water, burrowed beneath Taki’s shirt and made him gasp.

The sound made buttons fly off. Klaus veritably ripped Taki's shirt off and pressed him back against his pillow with a heavy kiss that made Taki moan in surprise and slight pain. Klaus buried his fingers in Taki's hair.

At that moment, to Klaus’ utter disbelief, there was a knock on his door.

* * *

‘Captain Wolfstadt?’

Klaus thought he recognised the voice of the private but at that moment, his mind was on a different planet. One where he was barrelling into Taki’s body and making him sweat and writhe and cling to him like his life depended on it.

So the only word that he could summon for whatever waited beyond the door was, ‘No.’

After a brief silence, the private outside came back with, ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

‘No!’ Klaus yelled. ‘I said no. Whatever it is, my answer is fucking _no!_ I’m busy.’

‘But sir, you told me to let you know if Major Uemura needed anything.’

‘I –’

There was a telling pause and then Klaus dropped his head to Taki’s bare chest.

‘He's trying to dislodge the ladder in the war room, sir, and I think there’s some kind of problem. He asked for someone tall enough to –’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Klaus said with a loud sigh.

Taki lay still beneath him and tried to breathe quietly. Klaus lifted his head to look at him.

‘Times like this I want to tell myself it’s Uemura’s own damn fault for jumping in front of my gun.’

Taki knew there was nothing but guilt behind his words. So he waited. Klaus eventually lifted up and dismissed the private. Slowly, like he was coaching himself through each independent move, he got out of bed, ran a hand through his hair and headed for the door.

When Taki tried to sit up too, Klaus turned at once.

‘No, no, no,’ he warned, pointing at the mattress. ‘Stay right there. Don’t move from that bed. Don’t change your mind. Don’t put any clothes on. The minute I get back, I’m fucking you for hours.’

The wolfish glint in his eye was still there, still dangerous, even from the other side of the room. Taki sat frozen on the bed, feeling somehow winded.

‘But I –’

‘Is that clear, Commander?’

Klaus stared at Taki’s naked chest and arms and fought a surge of lust. He was so busy ogling and cursing the day he accidentally shot Uemura that he barely noticed Taki’s near-imperceptible nod.

Long after the door closed and Klaus’ footsteps receded, his grin stayed with Taki in the same way that a streak of sunlight imprinted on closed eyelids.

* * *

As Klaus sprinted through the grounds and collided head-on with Haruki, Taki lay back and tried to remain still. The west had taught him, in stages, how to relax. He had sometimes wiled away entire afternoons with nothing to do and even enjoyed his idleness. Oftentimes Klaus had been near him, not even touching him, and they had been able to spend hours doing and saying nothing.

But back in the east, even with a compound that was nearly empty, he was suddenly finding it difficult to lie still. He experienced a very specific breed of restlessness. A specific discomfort he wasn’t familiar with.

It took him a few seconds to identify it as sexual frustration.

In the silence of that damning realisation, he blushed, sighed and got to his feet. He considered putting his shirt on but, on impulse, decided against it.

After a few aimless seconds of wandering around the room, splashing water onto his face from Klaus’ bathroom and then stepping back out, Taki found himself by Klaus' desk. He looked at the stack of hardcover books that were still sitting in a corner and remembered how he had once wondered what they were.

One of them Taki didn’t expect. A novel, and a rather hefty one at that. _Krieg und Frieden._ It was a book that had also been on Taki’s list for a long time. He flipped through it idly, struggling to imagine Klaus sitting back and reading.

The other was a book of Eastern sayings that Klaus must have picked up as he learned the language. He turned to a page Klaus had marked with a dog-ear. A small pencil mark in the margin directed him to a line halfway down the page.

_Only the dead have seen the end of war._

Taki stared at the kanji in silence for some time, wondering why he was suddenly host to terrible sense of foreboding. The image of flames came to him vividly. The heat of the wolf that he crouched beside. The growl that reverberated through its body.

He snapped the book shut and reached for the last one on the pile.

His hand faltered when he saw the bullet holes in the cover.

Heart suddenly pounding, he picked up the book that had saved Klaus’ life. He slowly turned through the pages.

Why this one? he wondered. Why did Klaus choose a schoolbook from Luckenwalde to put in his coat right before –?

At the exact moment his eyes fell on the page with his own writing scribbled in the corner, Klaus swung the door open.

_Danke schon._

‘Hey.’

Pleased and distracted by the sight of Taki still wearing only his trousers with the suspenders hanging low, it took Klaus a while to notice the strange look on his face.

Taki closed the book gently and put it back on the desk. His fingers hovered around the bullet holes as Klaus drew up behind him.

Klaus saw what Taki had been looking at and there was a self-conscious pause.

‘I didn’t realise…’ Taki said, until it occurred to him he hadn’t thought his entire sentence through.

Klaus didn’t seem to mind. He wrapped his arms around Taki’s bare chest.

‘I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve saved each other’s hides,’ he said.

He bent low to kiss Taki’s shoulder. The warmth of his lips had the counter-intuitive effect of making Taki shiver.

Reaching up, Taki ran a hand over Klaus’ upper arms, feeling their strength even through layers of clothing. He then gently laid a hand on the side of Klaus’ face, trying not to think about how an innocuous moment in Luckenwalde, one that he had entirely forgotten about until that very second, had been the difference between Klaus being alive and dead.

For the second time that day, Klaus felt a switch being flicked inside him.

* * *

It wasn’t that he thought Taki would completely cease to display the type of affection Klaus had almost gotten used to in the west. It was more that Klaus hadn’t really known what to expect upon their return.

And Taki’s hands on his arms, the gentle feel of his palm on Klaus’ face, had been such a profound relief that it bypassed his ability to be tender and grateful. Instead, it ignited that old, dangerous spark.

 _I love you._ _I love you so much it physically hurts and then it makes me want to hurt you_ _to show you how much –_

He wrenched both of Taki’s hands behind his back so quickly that Taki only had time to inhale sharply.

‘Didn't I tell you not to leave the bed?’

Taki recognised the rumble of his voice and didn’t need to see his eyes to know how they had changed. Still holding Taki’s wrists firmly in one hand, Klaus bent him forwards over the desk, pushing out a small grunt.

He quickly whipped off his own tie and bound Taki’s hands behind his back, tightening the knot much too hard against his skin. Taki cried out in surprise.

‘Ah! Klaus –’

‘Too late to complain now.’

Klaus peeled off his coat and shirt, his eyes fixed on the muscles that bulged on Taki’s arms as he strained against the binds. He spun Taki around and the force of his kiss was so strong that Taki’s body arched backwards over the desk. Klaus followed that momentum and pressed himself between Taki’s legs until he was sitting on the desk and straddling Klaus’ hips. 

He broke off just to remove Taki’s pants as swiftly as he could. Taki watched, his face flushed and his eyes already misting over. He wanted to complain about the tightness of his binds but he was worried that he might be ignored again. More than that, he worried what it might mean if Klaus ignored him again.

Klaus crouched low at the edge of the desk and lifted Taki’s legs in the air. The feel of his tongue on Taki’s hole always managed to catch Taki completely off guard. His moans filled the shed.

As impatient as he was, Klaus took his time. He ran his tongue around the gently ridged, tender edge before thrusting in, relishing the moans above him. He held Taki’s legs open wide, holding them down as he lapped and licked, before throwing them over his shoulders and straightening up.

As he was claimed, Taki shivered again at the look on Klaus’ face. His cock pushed without penetrating for a few seconds, just enough time for Klaus to run his thumb along Taki’s lips and push in just a little, just to wet the tips of his fingers.

‘Don’t hold your voice back,’ Klaus told him. The words managed to sound like a warning.

He leaned forward so far, with Taki’s legs still over his shoulders, that Taki’s knees were pressed against his chest and his ass in the air. He whimpered as his bound hands dug into the small of his back.

He had absolutely no control over the sound that was ripped from his throat when Klaus’ cock pushed into his body.

‘That’s it,’ Klaus hissed through gritted teeth. ‘Let me hear you take it.’

‘Ugh! Klaus - _ah!_ ’

The desk rattled and jolted with every thrust, the books shuddering on the surface, _Krieg und Frieden_ skipping precariously close to the edge.

* * *

Taki lost track of time.

The pain in his wrists had long since been eclipsed by the agonising pleasure of Klaus pressing into and on top of his own helpless, contorted body. His cock pounded almost angrily and Taki had no choice but to bear it. And bear the uncanny way in which it seemed to brush against his spot on every thrust.

‘You’re tightening up,’ Klaus observed, arms planted on either side of his head. ‘Are you going to come?’

‘Nngh! Ah… yes!’

‘Do it. Come hard, Taki.’

Taki shuddered once, then twice, and on the third tremor he felt himself gush and spill over onto his own stomach. His head fell back with a resounding thud on the desk.

But Klaus didn’t give him a chance to catch his breath. He pulled out without warning and pulled Taki to the edge of the desk where he was unceremoniously flipped over onto his stomach.

Taki braced, expecting him to plunge back in from behind, but instead he felt the tie loosen around his wrists and then fall away. The air stung his chafed skin.

And in the next breath, Klaus had taken his arm and thrown him again onto the bed. He turned and was met with the sight of Klaus walking over slowly, his hand moving with deliberate strength over his cock and his eyes roaming freely over Taki’s body. Taki clenched the sheets unconsciously.

With one knee on the bed, Klaus bent down and met his lips in a surprisingly soft kiss. His tongue sought Taki's coaxingly. He kissed Taki's lower lip and tugged at it gently with his teeth.

He then spun him around and held his face into the pillow.

‘I’m about to fuck you again,’ he told him, his words as slow and deliberate as the hand that was still stroking his own cock.

Taki groaned and squirmed, his cheek flat against the pillow.

Klaus spread his cheeks with both hands, slipped his cock in completely and held it there, watching how Taki’s mouth fell open and his eyes squeezed shut.

He then pulled back out completely and stared at the way Taki’s hole puckered and twitched in his absence. Taki gasped.

And Klaus plunged again. Taki gripped the pillow with both hands.

_‘Ah!’_

‘Shit,’ Klaus whispered. In a slightly louder voice, he said, ‘Can you feel how your body makes room for me, Taki?’

He pulled back out entirely, counted out the seconds, then eased the head back in and plunged all the way to the hilt once more. Taki cried out, sounding woeful.

‘Every time,’ Klaus breathed. ‘Your hole just swallows me up. Can you feel it?’

'Nngh,' Taki moaned in desperation, forgetting how to string any two words together.

In the end, Klaus made good on his threat. He didn't let up for hours.

* * *

Utterly spent, feeling as though they had stumbled into a realm where time and gravity and space had warped around them, they finally lay recumbent in a pile of sheets and sweat. The sun poured in through curtains they had unadvisedly forgotten to draw.

Groaning through the pleasure of having come three times in the past two hours, Klaus crawled to Taki and pressed his forehead against his temple.

‘You okay?’

Taki panted and nodded, struggling to keep his eyes open. Klaus blindly felt for his hand, found it and held it.

 _He was… It was frightening to see,_ Claudia had said.

In his addled state, Taki tried to assess. Over the past day, he had seen flashes of Klaus’ desire to hurt. To dominate. To imprint his desire on Taki's body in some way.

And finally, Taki was beginning to understand it. Even revel in it.

If the wolf came out of him like that. In bursts where POWs were slightly shaken up. Or where Taki emerged from a whirl of unreal pleasure with nothing more than sore wrists. Where he would be able to watch Klaus lying beside him like this, smiling, with beads of sweat coating his face.

Then it didn't seem like anything Taki couldn't handle.

My wolf, Taki thought, lifting his free hand to run through Klaus’ sweat-drenched hair. My knight.

* * *

A solitary bird twittered and scratched about on the roof of the shed. It made Taki think of the time when Klaus sang to himself as he replaced the shingles on the cottage.

‘Oh,' Klaus murmured into the silence. 'Guess who I ran into earlier?’

‘Who?'

'Haruki. And I mean I literally ran into him. Poor kid went flying.’

‘He must have volunteered to stay behind.’

‘You’d think he’s done enough for his country by now.’

Motes of dust whirled in the falling sunbeams.

‘He’ll make a good soldier,’ Taki observed.

The thought of Haruki as a soldier, a real one, armed and dangerous and on the front lines, filled Klaus with an inexplicable sorrow. Out of nowhere, it made him think of all the men he had lost. Every single one. Starting with Shigeki Ota during Operation Hannibal all the way back to his squadron in the first war. In the intervening years since he had seen them, it was almost too easy to superimpose the kid’s open, trusting gaze on their faces.

Even though theirs were faces that Klaus would never forget.

As always happened when his mind drifted down that dark path, Klaus thought of Taki and brought himself back. He had also been close to wandering that way, down the echoing, teetering, dizzying spiral, when he got the letter from Claudia. When he saw her in the wheelchair for the first time and succumbed to the periodic fear that she was slipping away.

But he hadn’t lost her. He wasn’t going to lose her.

And he had Taki.

And that was all that mattered.

And if things could fall into place like that for him, Klaus reflected, there was no reason why it couldn't for others. There was no reason, goddamn it, why there couldn't be real, lasting peace in everyone's future.

‘I’m kind of hoping the kid does something else,’ he said in a different voice. ‘It’s a shame for all the good ones to be swallowed up by war. Too late for us. But not too late for him.’

Taki pondered for a few moments.

‘Hopefully there won’t be another war in his time,’ he agreed.

 _Only the dead have seen the end of war_ , he thought suddenly.

* * *

A few hours later, Klaus awoke to find he was curled around Taki and that the afternoon had crawled by without their noticing. He checked his watch and sighed.

‘That goddamn kid…’

Taki opened his eyes halfway.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked without turning.

Klaus nuzzled the back of his neck.

‘What time does the officers’ train leave?’

‘Four.’

Half an hour. Klaus took a slow breath. If it wasn’t Uemura, it was Haruki. Life debts all over the place.

‘I’m going to go see the kid off.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll be back soon.’

Taki murmured his assent before drifting off again. Klaus smiled and gently withdrew his arms from around him.

* * *

The bike zipped away from the train station, displacing air and filling the world with its steady, triumphant roar. Behind his goggles, Klaus smiled at the memory of his brief but poignant conversation with the cadet.

After the soldiers on guard waved him through the main gates, Klaus saw next to no one in the compound. From what Taki had told him, there were only half a dozen officers left on the grounds including Hasebe and Uemura; those who would only take their leave when the commander left for the residence in a few days.

The Reizen residence. Where Klaus imagined he would be given a private room covered with tatami mats, the walls decorated with soothing watercolours of mountains. Where in place of drills and barked orders and marching platoons, he would hear the sounds of Taki's sisters running about. Where Taki would knock on his door and slide it open wearing those maroon robes.

Where just around the corner was that tree, _their_ tree, under which they might spend the occasional afternoon. Under which, if Klaus played his cards right, they might do more than just lie around…

He was idealising it, to be sure. Taki’s duties as head of his estate would keep him occupied at all hours. But it was no longer the war, and Klaus permitted himself to dream.

Still, he would miss the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

Klaus rode slowly through the compound, taking his time, feeling strangely sentimental. As though it was the end of an era. Dusty pink petals swept the grounds and coated the floor beneath the cherry blossom tree like icing. Klaus remembered the compound through the crisp leaf-strewn autumn and the biting wind-swept snow of winter. It had been his home, for better or worse, for most of that past year.

The only thing that could have marred his little moment, and did, was the sight of Hasebe jogging over to his bike from the other side of the courtyard. Klaus killed the engine and flipped his goggles up to his forehead.

‘Wolfstadt!’

Hasebe was already out of breath.

‘Yeah?’

‘Where’s Taki-sama?’

_Hopefully still sleeping naked in my bed._

‘Why?’

‘We’ve just received word from the emperor.’

‘Meiji-sama?’

‘He didn’t give a lot away over the phone. He said he needed Taki-sama for something he only trusted him with. Some kind of a mission. He'll brief Taki-sama when he's at the capital.’

Klaus stared.

‘But we’ve sent everyone home.’

‘We’ll take the remaining officers and back-up soldiers from the Mitzue Outpost.’

Klaus sighed.

‘Roger that. I’ll let him know.’

As Hasebe took off at a sprint for the officers’ quarters, Klaus gunned the bike back to life. He wondered if it made sense to be feeling both exasperated and excited at the same time. He then slipped his gun out of his belt and checked the cartridge again before slamming it closed.

And we're right back in, he thought.


	29. The Newest Son of Heaven

Tachibana paced.

He knew, by the grace of both instinct and shrewdness, that the new emperor was onto him. It was inevitable; it was something he’d expected for months. Still, that did little to soften the blow. He had been so close. The war had been a good distraction. It had turned the previous emperor’s attention from his own land. Behind the scenes, the plans Tachibana had engineered alongside Chancellor Mussolin had gone exactly as planned.

And then, thanks to a handful of men – men whose roles and relationships Tachibana couldn’t figure out no matter how much he tried – all of their plans were lost to the wind.

Almost all of their plans, Tachibana reminded himself. He was still a shogun. He still had his province and his power. And part of the plan he had developed alongside Mussolin was still very much alive. So long as no one caught on. He was so close. Close enough that he was still willing to fight to protect everything he had built.

He paced and waited.

* * *

Klaus felt a bit like a child when he entered the Imperial Palace grounds for the first time. The Reizen residence was beautiful in its own serene way, with its old-fashioned boardwalks bounding inner courtyards and its quiet deference to nature. The Imperial Palace, on the other hand, had clearly been built to impress.

A bridge with grand double arches took their convoy into the palace grounds. Klaus couldn’t be sure if they were crossing a moat or a river. A pair of massive swans floated on the water far below, their stillness reminding Klaus of a mallard ornament that once sat in his father’s study. Pendulous lights, white and spherical, hung from lampposts like small moons.

As they crossed, Klaus was a little startled to see people on a far bank outside the palace grounds bowing low to the bridge before continuing on their way. Neither Taki nor the driver seemed to make much of this little peculiarity. No matter how much Klaus thought he understood the amount of veneration that Taki’s people harboured for their leaders, he found he was still turning the corner to yet more surprises. He thought of Taki and Meiji. Gods in the forms of men.

In front of him, Taki’s hair jolted slightly with the vibrations of the car. From where he was on the backseat, Klaus stared at the fair skin on the nape of his neck and the dark devil’s peak of hair above it. He turned to look out the window before his thoughts ran away from him.

A few members of the Imperial Guard gave their vehicles a once-over before admitting them. Klaus cast an eye over their dark-blue tunics and red breeches topped off with a kepi, feather plume and all. He almost snorted at the thought that he might have been made to wear something similar if he had become emperor’s knight.

He craned his head to look out the window of the jeep as they pulled into the grounds, which resembled a large reserve more than palace grounds. They eventually wound around a lush fountain and drew in front of the palace itself. Massive vaulted windows and turrets greeted them, in addition to the romantically curved eaves that were typical of the east.

Taki led the way up the stairs into the palace with Klaus close on his heels. Hasebe and Uemura followed. The rest of the convoy, comprising a dozen soldiers, remained in the vehicles by the fountain. They were received by various chamberlains and attendants to the emperor at the doorway. A few more guards gave them pat-downs and Klaus was forced to give up his gun. They were then ushered inside.

The demure grace of the east appeared to have been left behind on the other side of the bridge. There was nothing at all demure about the cavernous, gilded ceilings of the entrance hall and the richly coloured murals; floor-to-ceiling renderings of oceans and flowers and trees as white as snow. They crossed the floor, followed by petals falling and frozen on the walls.

Taki, for whom the Imperial Palace had become a familiar sight over the course of his uncle’s long reign, noticed out of the corner of his eye how Klaus seemed utterly taken by their surroundings. He held back a smile. Two attendants opened a set of double doors into the throne room. Klaus’ mouth fell open.

Every bit as vast as the entrance hall, and boasting yet more of the huge textured murals, the Throne Room’s singular feature was that the entire left wall was missing. The hall-sized room opened onto a boardwalk and railing that overlooked startling vista of water and trees. A large, still pond, nearly the size of a lake, perfectly reflected the horizontal canopies of bonsai-like niwaki trees on the opposite shore. Bursting from the soft red maple trees, a heron skimmed low over the water and disappeared behind the rushes. It took Klaus a moment to remember they were still within palace grounds.

All of this, he realised in mute disbelief, could have been Taki’s.

At the far side of the room was a slightly raised platform framed by thick curtains hanging from the ceiling. Meiji’s half-lidded eyes were recognisable even from a distance. His robes were spread around him on the floor where he kneeled and his head was slightly bowed beneath his tall, curved headdress. The three men who were kneeling before him got to their feet, bowed low and turned to leave. Their military uniforms were heavy with decorations.

As they drew up to the new arrivals, Taki recognised one of them and saluted. Hasebe and Uemura followed suit.

‘General Nakamori, sir,’ Taki said in clipped tones.

Jowls, heavy eyebrows and a prominent lower lip. Klaus had never met him personally but he knew of General Saigo Nakamori. The man who had served as the late emperor’s primary military strategist, the one who called all the shots at headquarters, had had his fair share of front-page publicity. Trying not to remember an eerie moment where headquarters had gone silent and Taki had taken the blame for a train mission that went very wrong, Klaus reluctantly saluted as well.

‘Commander,’ the general replied with his own salute. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

Behind his stiff features, it was hard to tell whether he was being sincere.

After they left, Taki and the others approached the platform. Klaus was torn between staring at the mirror-like surface of the pond and the way that Meiji’s face lifted into his small enigmatic smile as they drew near. Two rows of attendants waited on either side of the room, still as statues.

A gentle breeze ruffled hair and clothes and curtains alike.

_I can’t believe what he left behind just to come here with you._

Claudia’s voice swam at him, out of the heat of the west and out of that bedroom where they spoke in soft voices.

 _I… I can’t be sure it was all for me_ , Klaus had said.

_Of course it was for you._

Klaus remembered, even more than the words, the resounding certainty of her voice. He looked at Taki again.

Then he turned to face the emperor of the east; descendant of the gods and the newest Son of Heaven. They all knelt and bowed, foreheads almost touching the tatami floor.

* * *

‘I apologise for having taken you away from your duties at the compound,’ Meiji said slowly.

‘We’re winding down, Your Majesty,’ Taki said. ‘The compound is almost empty.’

‘In that case I apologise for delaying your return home.’ His voice was low and almost musical in its cadence. ‘I hope this little errand won’t take up too much of your time.’

Meiji wore magenta robes embellished with small orange chrysanthemums, held together at his waist by an orange sash. His tall, arching headdress captured the sunlight in similar splashes of orange.

Klaus’ eyes were once again drawn to his tranquil gaze and flawless complexion. He had once guessed Meiji to be in his mid-thirties, despite his face having an ageless quality to it. A jaw that tapered into a fine chin. Thin lips drawn into a feline smile that concealed all the mysteries of the world.

‘I was trying my best to be discreet when I contacted you,’ Meiji said. ‘But I should have mentioned that you didn’t need to bring the cavalry.’

‘The cavalry, Your Grace?’ Taki asked after a moment.

‘Your men,’ he replied. ‘The ones behind you and the soldiers I’m told are waiting outside. I think Grand Chamberlain Hasebe might have overreacted somewhat. I hope you haven’t mustered the whole army beyond the moat, Grand Chamberlain.’

Hasebe turned a colour that rivalled Meiji’s robes.

‘I – my humblest apologies, Your Majesty! It – I must have misunderstood. That is –’

Hasebe blustering and debasing himself was quite the spectacle for Klaus. He grinned widely, forgetting for the moment where he was. Meiji caught Klaus’ eye for a split second and his lips twitched.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, Grand Chamberlain. It’s just that this is a more… delicate matter. It requires a gentle touch.  That’s why I asked for you personally, Taki.’

Taki bowed his head. ‘I’m at your service, Your Grace.’

‘Then come.’

Meiji got to his feet and one of the attendants hurried over the help him gather his robes behind him. The others hastened to get to their feet as well.

‘I’m weary of all this standing on occasion. Taki, would you be so kind as to accompany me to my private quarters? We can speak more comfortably there.’

‘Of course.’

‘My courtiers will show your men to the drawing room in the meantime. We shouldn’t be too long.’

The emperor turned and descended the steps towards the boardwalk on the left, his movements so refined that he seemed to glide from the room, his head held aloft by some invisible force. Klaus was reminded of the day at the compound when he floated down the corridor towards the room where Taki was resting. He tried to recall the conversation they had when Klaus barred his way. It had been short but somehow gratifying.

As Taki followed the emperor, Klaus turned to follow Hasebe and Uemura in the direction indicated by one of the attendants. Meiji then looked over his shoulder.

‘Actually,’ he said. ‘I was hoping for your company as well, Captain Wolfstadt.’

Klaus stopped and turned in surprise. The emperor’s expression was both sly and sedate.

‘It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone smile around here.’

* * *

The head of the Imperial Guard, a tall, stern-faced man in his fifties by the name of Natsume, led their little procession down the boardwalk and through to the emperor’s private residence. Which was an entire compound in and of itself, Klaus realised. He stared at the delicate arched bridge that crossed the pond at its narrowest point. Beyond he saw glimpses of the same curved eaves and architecture of the front of the palace. He wondered how large the place was. How long it would take to explore all of it.

‘I see you’re an admirer of the grounds, Captain.’

Meiji, who was walking directly in front of Taki and Klaus, hadn’t turned once since they left the Throne Room. Klaus wondered how he had noticed.

‘Yes, Your Grace,’ he replied, slightly awkwardly. He had to stop himself from calling the emperor ‘Meiji-sama’, a title that, despite no longer being appropriate, his mind had apparently fixated on. ‘This place is – it’s something else.’

‘You can thank Taki’s uncle for that. He was devoted to the grounds and his efforts were well rewarded, as you can see.’

The emperor then turned and, out of the corner of his eye, he threw Klaus a strange, subtle look.

‘The Reizens seem to have an eye for beautiful things.’

After he turned back, it took a few moments for the words to sink in. Klaus blinked and stared incredulously at the back of Meiji’s headdress. He then glanced sidelong at Taki, wondering if he too had heard anything suggestive but Taki didn’t seem fazed. Klaus decided he was imagining things.

* * *

Meiji dismissed his guard as they drew up to the residence; a low, charming building that faced the pond. Natsume appeared reluctant to leave the emperor without protection in the presence of two guests, one of whom was clearly a foreigner. He gave himself away with an uncomfortable flick of his eyes.

‘Natsume,’ Meiji said patienty. ‘This is Taki Reizen and Klaus von Wolfstadt. If either of them wanted me dead, it would take a lot more than you to stop them.’

Taki seemed mildly shocked by his words. Klaus grinned again and a small chuckle escaped him. Though the emperor’s words didn’t at all seem to placate Natsume, he bowed and left.

Meiji allowed the attendant into his sitting room to help him remove the heavier elements of his headdress. Some of his hair escaped the binds and fell like strokes of black ink over his forehead and cheek. Klaus was surprised at how long it was. Minimally furnished, the huge room featured polished floorboards, streaming sunlight and the soft sound of a creek nearby. Taki and Klaus knelt on cushions before the emperor as his attendant worked above him.

‘How was your stay in the west?’ the emperor asked unexpectedly.

Klaus and Taki exchanged a look that was part surprise and, though the question didn’t really call for it, part self-consciousness. A dusty amber lamp. A kiss that sent firewood tumbling back out into the rain. Lying naked in the sun in a hidden clearing. Two whole months on the other side of the sky.

Based purely on etiquette, it was Taki’s question to answer. But Klaus was worried, suddenly, that he wouldn’t know what to say. Or that, when he answered, his tone would be cold or officious or –

‘It was... it was really good,’ Taki said, his voice quiet, his hands firmly in his lap. ‘Your Grace.’

His eyes were on the table before him but their expression was soft. There was even a small hint of colour in his cheeks. Klaus dropped his gaze too and smiled. Surprised. Relieved. Thankful. It seemed there was no end to the permutations of feelings that Taki’s small words and gestures could inspire in him.

‘I trust your sister is doing better, Captain,’ Meiji continued, his face impassive beneath the exertions of his attendant.

Klaus was again a little startled that he knew. He seemed to have eyes everywhere.

‘She is, Your Majesty. Thank you.’

‘The quorum was told that Taki had urgent political matters to attend to in the west,’ Meiji explained, picking up on his surprise. ‘But your master confided in me before he left.’

Taki looked a little guilty but Klaus only smiled at him.

Meiji watched them with a fondness he couldn’t quite place. They were both stiff and upright in their military jackets, Taki’s jade and Klaus’ tan, black ties and crisp collars. Though nothing they said or did ever belied their ages, it occurred to Meiji for the first time how young they both were. Even the captain, despite his unrefined handsomeness – the bluntly masculine features and immense build – was several years shy of turning thirty.

And he was still a lot older than his young master. Meiji took in Taki’s striking features that always reminded him of a porcelain doll. The shock of glistening hair and shining eyes. Though he was still very fair, the west seemed to have left a faint glow on his skin.

Beyond this, Meiji sensed there was something different about Taki, whom he had known since he was a boy. Despite his perfect posture and the intentness of his gaze whenever Meiji spoke to him, there was an ineffable sense of peace that hung around him. As though there was, swimming before Taki’s eyes, a place and time that no one else could see. Somewhere he would rather be. Something he now struggled to look past in order to be present.

The attendant finally removed the arch, leaving Meiji wearing the much lighter crown-shaped base of his headdress.

‘General Nakamori took up a whole half hour and my neck is stiff,’ he complained good-naturedly. ‘And I failed to get anything useful out of him anyway.’ His expression changed in a way that very slightly eclipsed his humour. ‘I called General Nakamori here for the same reason I called you. It’s about Tachibana.’

He fell silent when the attendant returned, poured out three cups of steaming green tea out of a squat teapot and left again.

‘I hope you forgive my bluntness,’ Meiji said. ‘I want to spare us all the headache of minced words. To put it briefly, I’m concerned about the goings on in Tachibana’s province.’

He outlined the reports that had come out of that area. Unidentified fumes being released into the air. Several locals who had fallen sick from having drunk the water from the nearby treatment plant. 

‘It’s been happening for almost two years. But it slipped under the radar, especially during the war.’

Another courtier arrived, whom Meiji introduced as his grand chamberlain, and placed police files before Taki. He turned through pages of fenced-off warehouse complexes in Tachibana’s province. Three of them.

‘I suspect he’s developing weapons.’

Taki looked up. For no reason, he remembered the heat of the fire. The wolf’s low growl.

‘Weapons?’

‘A kind we haven’t seen.’

As Meiji explained and Taki turned the pages, passing each one to Klaus when he was done, his theory began to make sense. The heightened security. The cover stories. Taki remembered Tachibana’s last words to him. His careful vying for a Tachibana dynasty. The uncle who had served as interim emperor until Taki passed the title onto Meiji.

‘Your Grace,’ Taki said cautiously. ‘Are you worried he’s planning to stage a coup?’

A ringing silence fell.

‘I’m afraid,’ Meiji said with a faint, wry smile, ‘it’s nothing more than a hunch. For now.’

Klaus read the police report. When they investigated, Tachibana claimed he was funding the development of new technology for the mining industry, his province being rich in mineral deposits.

‘General Nakamori doesn’t have any intelligence of anyone engaged in the building of unauthorised weapons,’ the emperor continued. ‘If that’s his official report, and Tachibana’s, I can’t do much about my suspicions from here.’

‘Why not?’ Klaus asked. ‘Your Majesty,’ he added again, mentally kicking himself.

‘Shoguns are permitted to use their provinces as they see fit. Unless it endangers the welfare of the nation as a whole.’

‘If the emperor were to meddle,’ Taki said, thinking the situation over, ‘it would be seen as an intrusion. The shogunate has always operated independently.’

Klaus recalled what he had learned about the ways that power was divided in the east. It was a careful balance between the emperor’s power over the entire nation and the independent rule of each province, including the one which was governed by the Reizens.

‘But,’ Meiji said, his eyes on Taki and his tone heavy with insinuation. ‘If the head of another estate were to speak to Tachibana instead of me. Say, a shogun with a formidable military background that might make Tachibana nervous enough to divulge. A leader acting under his own authority and not mine…’

And then the mission became clear to Taki.

‘You want me to find out what Tachibana’s up to. Without involving you just yet.’

‘Just to set my mind at ease,’ said Meiji. ‘It’s no secret that he wanted the throne for his family. I can’t help but wonder.’

‘But if he is developing weapons – new weapons,’ Taki said slowly with a slight frown. ‘Especially if you think it’s for some kind of coup, we’ll need military back up.’

‘I hope not,’ Meiji replied. ‘I want to keep this strictly a non-military matter, as much as such a thing is possible. A discussion between shoguns.’

Taki looked at the photos of each warehouse complex.

‘If he doesn’t give anything away, it’ll take a special ops team to break in and find out what he’s hiding.’ He looked up at the emperor. ‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but no matter which way you try to approach it, this has to be a military investigation.’

‘I agree,’ Klaus added.

Meiji took a moment to consider it.

‘Is there a way to do it and avoid hostilities? The last thing I want is some kind of a trigger that ends up spiralling out of control. I had a dream about a civil war the other day. Gods forbid.’

Klaus thought about what he had envisioned only hours ago as he lay beside Taki in bed. Real, lasting peace in everyone’s future. If Tachibana was up to something that would threaten it…

‘If you’re right about what he’s doing, Your Grace,’ he said in a voice so firm that both the emperor and Taki turned to him. ‘We’ll stop him.’

‘And we’ll be as careful as we can,’ Taki added.

Meiji looked from one to the other, struck by the way in which they were on the same page without having even consulted one another first. In the same way that Claudia Strauss had been weeks ago, he was amused to note how the two of them didn’t even seem to be aware of their harmony. He smiled.

* * *

‘It’s been two months into my reign and already I feel like I’ve aged several years.’

Taki felt the emperor’s gaze on him.

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, Taki, but I believe it all stemmed from your singular powers of persuasion. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to have let you talk me into wearing the crown.’

Although it was clear that he was joking, etiquette made it impossible for Taki to come up with an appropriate response. In the first place, he thought helplessly, proper etiquette would never allow the emperor to joke at all, let alone about a topic that carried so much weight.

Klaus, however, had no problem leaning into the emperor's jest.

‘I'll take some of the heat there, Your Grace.’

Taki looked round, a little nervous about Klaus' careless tone.

Meiji turned to him. ‘Indeed,’ he said, eyebrows arching over half-lidded eyes. ‘You know, Captain, I tried going over the few minutes we knew each other prior to you speaking highly of me to your master. I can’t think what I did to leave such an impression, but I'm glad for it.’

Klaus thought back to their meeting in the hallway outside Taki's room. ‘To be honest, I think it was mostly because of how you made Hasebe uncomfortable.’

Taki's flash of eyes made Klaus realise he had forgotten his place.

‘I – Your Majesty,’ he mumbled.

But Meiji was laughing. A low, pleasant chuckle that made his eyes twinkle. Klaus grinned with relief.

'The gods will be gratified to know that's all it takes to land the Imperial Throne in our time.'

Klaus let out a short, loud laugh. He realised surreally that he was bantering with the emperor of the east; descendant of the gods and the newest Son of Heaven.

* * *

Having agreed that it was to be a military operation, even if only as a last resort, Hasebe and Uemura were summoned into a strategy meeting in the main building. Meiji sat at the head of the table, flanked by Klaus and Taki who were both standing. The files were shared and plans of the province pored over. Not long into the discussions, the emperor managed to edge in a gracious apology to Hasebe.

‘It turns out you hadn’t overreacted at all, Grand Chamberlain.’

‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’

‘Of course, this means I will now expect you to bring a whole convoy of soldiers every time I summon you to the palace. Just in case it turns out they’re needed for one reason or another.’

‘I – if Your Majesty –’ Hasebe stammered, his brows knit together in confusion. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

He then returned to the plans that Taki and Uemura were drafting.

‘I wonder, Captain,’ Meiji said, leaning his head to the left and speaking quietly enough that only Klaus could hear, ‘if you and I are the only ones in this country with a sense of humour.’

The emperor’s face, when Klaus looked round, was perfectly composed, as though to undermine his own words. Klaus gave another surprised chuckle.

‘We might be, Your Grace,’ he replied in an undertone. He kept smiling as he imagined a future Hasebe, flustered and sweating and trying to assemble a small army for each of his trips to the capital.

* * *

The soldiers were briefed in a separate room. Taki and Hasebe would speak to Tachibana at his residence and give him the opportunity to confess. On the likely chance he would remain tight-lipped, Klaus and the rest of the soldiers would be waiting on the edge of one of his three warehouse complexes, within radio range, ready to infiltrate.

They already had on hand all the gear they needed (Hasebe had, in fact, overreacted and piled almost a full jeep with all manner of weapons and equipment). Each soldier including Klaus also had a set of military camouflage outfits. And so Meiji authorised them to head for Tachibana’s province that very afternoon, hopefully to catch him off guard before he got wind of any impending investigation. It was exactly how Klaus liked it. Instead of endless meetings and awaiting approval from headquarters, they were charging ahead with the pedal flat on the floor. He supposed there wasn’t much to wait for when they had the all-clear from the emperor himself.

Taki, on the other hand, seemed strangely quiet on the drive. Even Klaus, who thought he had gotten better at picking up subtle changes in his master’s mood, found it difficult to tell whether Taki was emanating a certain coldness or simply being his usual taciturn self. Unable to figure out what he had done wrong, Klaus hoped it was the latter.

The land changed gradually as they headed south of the capital. The wilderness edged in more boldly between buildings until they were winding through entire stretches of forest land.

Klaus tried to remember Tachibana. His immediate distrust of him and his uncle. The way he had carefully tried to convince Taki that the late emperor would have wanted a Tachibana dynasty. It was the same instinct-based dislike he harboured for the new Eurotean leader.

He wondered if sending Taki in to speak to Tachibana with only Hasebe for protection was something they ought to reconsider.

‘Maybe I should come with you,’ he said, breaking a long silence.

Taki didn’t turn. ‘Where?’

‘To meet Tachibana.’

‘There’s no need. We’re only there to talk.’

‘I know, but –’

‘And we need you in charge of the team that will be infiltrating the complex.’

‘One of the lieutenants can take command. They’ve been briefed well enough.’

Something in the rigidity of Taki’s shoulders. The way he turned his head to look out the window instead of turning to look at Klaus.

‘Changing the plan at the last minute is risky,’ he said, his tone a little crisp. ‘Especially if there’s no real need for it.’

‘I know Meiji-sama thinks that, but what if –’

‘We’re all going in as planned.’

He had only raised his voice slightly. But it was enough for Klaus to confirm that he was angry about something.

‘Okay,’ he said in a gentle tone, watching Taki carefully. ‘It was just a suggestion.’

There was a long pause. The lieutenant who was driving had remained dutifully silent throughout the drive.

‘Are you okay?’ Klaus asked finally.

Taki turned to him for the first time. He saw how Klaus had to bend his knees at sharp angles just to fit his long legs in the backseat. His upper arm was lying along the edge of the window and his hand dangled by the door. The dim grey of his camouflage-patterned fatigues set off the colour of his hair. His bright eyes cut through the gathering gloom of dusk. They contained a hint of real worry.

Taki felt a squirm of something. He berated himself for letting the unreined, ridiculous emotions over the past few hours get the better of him.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

He turned to face the front, hoping the voice in his head would quieten down.

_Meiji-sama._

And suddenly, he flashed back to that moment months ago when he heard Klaus use the honorific for the very first time. How surprised he had been.

* * *

Klaus didn’t think that Taki had noticed, but he had.

He noticed first when Meiji made his flippant comment about beauty as they walked through the grounds. He had concealed his mild surprise, believing, like Klaus did, that he had most likely imagined it. He had even heard what the emperor had murmured to Klaus during the strategy meeting. He remembered how it made his pulse pick up tellingly.

But above all he had noticed the laughter. That short, booming, bark of a laugh which Taki had always cherished and which, for the first time, had instead brought about the unmistakeable needle-point of jealousy. He had also heard how the emperor had responded in kind. He had seen how effortlessly Klaus and Meiji had brought that out in one another. It was something that seemed to unravel who they both were at their cores. Something that Taki was unable to share.

Despite being fully aware that it all came from a place of almost childish insecurity, Taki had spent the past hour or so weighed down by a knotted ball of feelings. Feelings as sudden and overpowering as they were absurd.

Absurd, a voice tried reminding him.

Then again, said a stronger voice, perhaps not. The voice seeped through his mind like a stain. It reminded him of all of those things he would rather not remember.

_I’m not whatever it is you’ve spent your whole life searching for._

His secret conviction. One that had crystallised over the years and become something unmovable. A belief that nothing could shake; not pledges of knighthood nor sweeping declarations of love nor words whispered into his hair in the dead of night as large, loving hands caressed him.

_Someone who deserves your light and is worthy of being by your side._

_An emperor_ , said the voice he both heeded and hated. _An emperor makes sense. Meiji specifically,_ the voice went on, cruel and thin and irrational, _makes sense, doesn’t he?_

Or someone like him, at any rate. Someone who was able to return that light rather than merely bask in it and selfishly absorb it. Someone who could draw out that laugh. Someone who –

And then there came Klaus’ voice from the backseat asking if he was alright. The worried look in his eye. It brought Taki back to Earth; made him realise how breathtakingly irrational he was being. To help him regain perspective, he tried to cast his mind back a few hours. Back to when he was woken gently by Klaus in his shed. The sun was still shining fiercely through the window and he had blinked through it to stare up at Klaus’ face, where a small smile played on wide lips. Klaus seemed like he had been on the point of saying something but instead he bent low to kiss him.

Taki remembered how, still naked beneath the sheets, he felt a spark of electricity race through his body from Klaus’ lips. From the gentle pressure of his tongue. He remembered the sudden desire for Klaus to climb back under the blankets. To cover Taki’s body with his own and take Taki’s face in both hands.

The unexpected disappointment when Klaus pulled back. And then, upon hearing the words ‘emperor’ and ‘mission’, feeling a different energy fill his body, sweeping in like the tide and washing away the desires he had momentarily scrawled into the sand.

After he got dressed and about to leave, Klaus had stopped him, pressed him against the door and kissed him one final time. And, like he had read the scrawls in the sand before they washed away, he had held Taki’s face in both hands.

* * *

Despite why they were there, Klaus had to admit that Tachibana’s province was beautiful – a new side of the east come to life from the murals he had seen in the palace. It was an ocean-bordered province of farmland and huge areas of wilderness. Boats swayed in the docks and mist gathered at the mouth of the harbour. A tree-filled land bridge stretched across to a peninsula on the far side of the water, edged by bright white sand. The sun sank behind the water, casting mournful red streaks across the sky.

They would be stealing into the warehouse complex, which was a short drive up a thinly wooded incline, after darkness fell. For now, the jeeps waited at the turn-off to the land bridge behind a fish shop that backed onto the water. In the silence that was reminiscent of the countryside in the west, they could hear boats knocking quietly against the dock and straining against their ropes.

When it was late enough, Taki gave the order to move out. The lieutenant left the jeep to pass on the order. Taki and Klaus stepped out as well; Klaus to join the soldiers in one of the other jeeps, Taki to see him off. A strong sea breeze tugged immediately at their coats and hair. It lifted the smell of salt out of the water. Klaus stared out at the mouth of the harbour. He wished he could move the curving peninsulas out of the way for an unimpeded view of the ocean.

He flicked his eyes back to Taki.

Making sure the lieutenant was out of eyeshot, Klaus took his arm and pulled him into the shadow of the jeep, perhaps a little more forcefully than he had planned. His stomach lurched at the way Taki stared up at him. It made him want to pin him against the jeep’s hood, no matter who was watching. He reined himself in.

He searched Taki’s eyes, wondering about his strange mood on the drive. Perhaps it was his anxiety over the mission, as simple and relatively safe as it was.

‘You sure you’re okay?’ he asked.

It was hard to tell in the darkness but he could have sworn Taki was blushing.

‘Yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m sorry about… before. I –‘

Klaus kissed him then, quick and hard. He then broke free and pressed his forehead against Taki’s. The smell of flowers mingled with the salt in the air. Through his gloves, Taki felt the crispness of the front of Klaus’ camouflage fatigues. He saw the sharp glint of the gun in his holster.

‘After this,’ Klaus said, his voice soft. ‘We’ll head home for good, right?’

Home conjured the cottage. Swaying wheat fields and Heinrich racing about wearing a checked tablecloth. Taki pictured it all before he realised Klaus meant the Reizen estate.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He turned his head slightly to make sure the lieutenant hadn’t returned. Klaus’ nearness out in the open made him nervous.

‘Will my room be near yours?’

Taki looked at him and began to respond before it occurred to him that Klaus was joking.

‘Just trying to think of things to look forward to,’ Klaus said.

The wind blew Taki’s hair forward and Klaus’ hair back. That very day, Taki had let Klaus’ hair fall through his fingers as he lay panting beside him. _My wolf_ , he had thought. _My knight._

Not long afterwards, when all the jeeps but one were pulling away up the incline, the lieutenant turned to see the commander watching them leave, his coat billowing in the wind that came from the sea, his face inscrutable.

* * *

The three jeeps blended into the shadows at the base of the hill. Klaus waited inside with his dozen soldiers, none of them special ops but all of them eager, all of them fresh with the memory of combat during the war, and all having absorbed their mission instructions when Klaus explained it to them.

As he stared out the windshield at the grassy incline, he recalled how he had waited for Lieutenant Shigeki Ota in the shadows of trees to bring him good news. They had instead resigned themselves to Thermopylae. Laid side by side in the tent and spoke of those waiting for them back home.

He thought of the planes that went down. The men he had lost. The panicked cries on the airwaves.

He grit his teeth.

‘Stay close together,’ he said suddenly into the silence. ‘Hold your fire unless fired on. This is more recon than infiltration. Keep it clean.’

The four soldiers in his jeep, a lieutenant and three privates, looked at him in surprise. It had all been covered during the briefing. They noticed a sudden edginess about their commanding officer.

‘We know, sir,’ the lieutenant responded.

Klaus heard the uncertain tone in his voice and turned to look at them. Men he had only known for a few hours. He wondered about the mothers and wives and girlfriends who wrote them every week, bringing them news from home. Proud of everything they had done. Relieved that the war was finally over.

Perhaps it was because he had let down his guard since the end of the war. Perhaps he was still dwelling on his and Taki’s almost sublime few months in his own country. Or, more insidiously, perhaps it was because of the memory of his fear of losing Claudia.

Whatever the case, for the first time in Klaus’ life, he suddenly wondered whether he could handle another loss.

The soldiers watched him nervously.

‘Sir?’

_Pull yourself together._

He brought Taki to the forefront of his mind. His steady words, his hand in Klaus’ and the conviction that he could do anything in the world if his master told him to.

‘Just making sure you were paying attention.’

Both he and his men were relieved to hear the brashness in his tone.

‘Don’t worry, boys,’ he said. ‘We’ll make it home by dinner.’

* * *

Rigid eyebrows. Taki noticed how they almost never moved.

Tachibana’s face was composed of clean lines. The horizontal lines of his eyebrows. The straight lines of his jaw and chin. The overall effect, however, was severe. Almost disconcerting in its expressionlessness. Taki remembered the subtle warmth of the emperor’s sly smile and wondered at how the smallest inflexions can alter an entire personality.

Green tea was poured and pleasantries exchanged. For the first few minutes, everything was cold and formal and by the book. Enough that Taki could almost predict what would be said next. The fluidity of Taki’s conversation in the emperor’s private quarters struck him even more by comparison.

It was time, he decided, to cut to the chase, etiquette be damned.

‘We’re here,’ Taki said after a particularly uncomfortable pause, ‘because of reports of what you’re building in your mining factories.’

Not a single twitch on Tachibana’s face. Hasebe seemed more on edge than he did.

‘With all due respect, Taki-sama,’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t see how that is any of your concern.’

‘It is if anything poses a threat to the nation’s security,’ Taki returned just as evenly. ‘You know if that’s the case that the emperor is well within his rights to –’

‘The emperor is aware of how important it is for shoguns to maintain power over their own province. Surely you can empathise?’

But Taki wasn’t to be diverted. He asked again.

And again.

Neither Tachibana’s words nor expressions gave anything away.

Taki knew there was a lot to be gained by facing one’s opponent head-on; to foresee the depth and extent to which they were willing to go. Facing Tachibana, however, it was impossible to know what might happen if Taki gave Klaus the order to move out. The only thing that was clear was that the emperor’s instincts had been spot on. They arrived at an impasse after twenty minutes of tense, icy sparring. Tachibana moved his head for the first time to glance at the grandfather clock; the only extravagant object in the entire room.

‘It’s getting late,’ he said simply.

Taki and Hasebe stood up. Tachibana accompanied them as far as the genkan before the front door.

Fists held by his sides, imagining Klaus waiting in the dark with his men, Taki turned to him one final time. ‘Our country has only just found peace,’ he said clearly, his tone hard-edged. ‘I won’t let anything jeopardise that.’

Tachibana stared back, his hands together and lost in the broad swell of his kimono sleeves.

‘I understand, Taki-sama,’ he replied serenely. ‘We all have our interests to protect.’

Taki played that line in his mind as they walked back down the driveway. It had been all but said aloud. As though Tachibana knew the game was up but was holding onto what he could. All it would take now was for someone to peel the lid back.

In the jeep, Hasebe passed him the hand-held radio. An identical one was held firmly in Klaus’ hand less than five klicks away.

Taki gave the order.

* * *

They waited until the security patrol had wandered out of sight, their torchlight scanning the hillside. A few scrambles up the chain-link fence, snips of wire cutters at the barbed wire on top, and they were through. Klaus was impressed with their stealth. He made a mental note of some names that he would recommend for a promotion. They ran uphill across the long, empty stretch of turf until they reached the building itself. As the photos revealed, it was a one-story brick factory with the air of an abandoned warehouse. Dead trees stuck out of squares in the asphalt. The windows were bricked up. Huge dark doors were set into the front of the building like gaping mouths. All firmly shut.

There was almost no cover but there was also no one in sight. The soldiers carefully watched Klaus’ strong, rapid hand signals. They moved slower when grass gave way to concrete and their footfalls began to echo. As they skirted the corner, Klaus’ eyes searched out the windows that would be their entryway.

They were also sealed.

He swore under his breath as he stared at the fresh bricks that covered each window, their colour a different shade to those of the building. The photos, he realised, were out of date. Panting slightly, the men waited for an order. Klaus rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He was left with two options. All in or all out. He turned to his second in command.

‘Who brought the explosives?’

* * *

  
Corporal Kenji Dazai, ex-army and now the head of security at Complex 2, felt his heart leap into his mouth when he saw the cut and furled section of barbed wire on the perimeter fence.

For almost two years, aside from drunk teenagers causing minor headaches, there had been virtually no disturbance. Two years where he and the other men had grown close in the way that only an extended covert operation could make them close. Just as he wondered whether drunk teenagers had simply gotten their hands on some wire cutters, out of nowhere there came a loud crack and flash of light from the building itself. Dazai whipped out his radio and ordered all units to move in.

They hurried to the side of the building where bricks were scattered on the ground, some smashed to pieces. There was a sizeable hole in one of the recently bricked-up windows.

 _Shit,_ Dazai thought. _These guys are serious._

They climbed through the hole into the dark building. Dazai had done interior sweeps before. Conveyer belts, large machines, and mining technology being developed and refined. Nothing out of the ordinary. And so he knew that whoever had broken in, military by the looks of it, would make a beeline for the lower basement level which Dazai had never been permitted to enter.

The factory floor was eerily silent and empty as all sixteen guards filed through, guns poised and ready. They slowly approached the stairs to the basement on the far end of the building. The light above the door at the base of the stairs was glowing green. Dazai nearly exhaled with relief. It meant, at the very least, that it was safe to enter. He noticed that the window set into the basement door was smashed in.

The guards were all so focused on the stairs, convinced that the trespassers were already in the lower level, that no one expected a dozen soldiers to leap out of the shadows of the factory floor and surround them.

* * *

A few minutes ago, Klaus had hurried down the stairs, squinting up at the green light. The door was padlocked. There was no way in without setting off more explosives. But some strange instinct in Klaus told him that setting off explosives in that area would be a terrible idea. Plus, he knew the guards would be onto them in a matter of seconds.

And so he took a page out of his mother’s book and threw his elbow into the door’s glass viewing panel. A decoy that was worthy of Beatrice von Wolfstadt. He and his men then retreated behind the machinery of the factory floor, most of them crouched behind the conveyor belt. While they had the element of surprise when they burst into the open, a few guards managed to whirl around and fire. Bullets ricocheted off metal every which way and the once-quiet factory came alive.

Amid the split-second tumult, Klaus took a quick mental snapshot of the situation, one that was greatly aided by the guard’s own torchlights. He mapped out his next few moves almost like the path had been traced on the ground and lit up before his eyes.

‘Take cover!’ he yelled at his men. ‘And hold your fire!’

As they did so, he darted behind one of the conveyor belts, crouched low until he was at the far end, then vaulted over it.

The guard didn’t see him coming. And when he turned to see the huge soldier leaping at him from out of nowhere, he very nearly dropped his gun. His training kicked in and he tried to spin the gun around and fire. Klaus grabbed the barrel of the guard’s gun and whipped it backwards, hearing the crunch it made as it made contact with his mouth. He then grabbed him in a chokehold and spun him around to face the rest of the guards.

All fifteen remaining guns and torches spun around to face him. Dazai’s face paled when he saw one of his men in the soldier’s grip, his lip bleeding.

‘Stand down!’ Klaus shouted, his gun pressed against the guard’s temple.

‘Let him go!’ Dazai yelled in reply, gun outstretched.

Similar shouts echoed from the others, both from him and his men.

‘Not until you stand down!’

‘Keep your guns on the others,’ Dazai ordered the rest of his men.

Guns on guns. Fingers poised on triggers. Voices shouting in a sort of reined panic, as though they were aware that a barrage of bullets might follow. Torchlights quivering as they darted from soldier to soldier. There could be carnage, Klaus realised. They were outnumbered.

But he would be damned if he had survived all else just so that this operation, this little scouting mission, would be the reason he never saw Taki again.

* * *

 _'Stand down!_ ’ Klaus bellowed in a voice louder than he knew he was capable of. His words boomed in terrifying echoes from all angles.

Dazai experienced a flash of real fear when he stared at the towering soldier whose eyes spelled death. He glanced at the face of the man in the chokehold. Tsunoda. Who never shut up about his home town. Who complained daily about the ugly-as-sin building they protected around the clock. Tachibana had told Dazai to protect the building’s secret at all costs. Even if there are bodies, he had said. Dazai knew that meant on either side. Tsunoda’s body too.

And suddenly, almost tiredly, he realised he would be damned if he had survived the first war and avoided the second war just so that this operation, this ugly-as-sin building with its secrets, would be the reason he had to watch his men die.

He looked again at the implausibly tall blonde soldier for a few more heated seconds. Then he ordered his men to stand down.

* * *

_‘Master. Do you read me?’_

His voice was low and warm, rumbling through the dotted speakers. Taki sat up in the jeep at once. They were still parked outside Tachibana’s residence. Hasebe waited, ready to relay the report to Uemura who had remained with the emperor.

‘Are you okay?’ Taki asked, hearing the breathlessness in his own voice.

_‘I’m fine.’_

Taki closed his eyes.

‘Any casualties?’

_‘One of theirs might need a band-aid for his lip.’_

‘So –‘

_‘We’re in. The complex is secure. Didn’t fire a single bullet.’_

Pride rushed over Taki like a wave. Hasebe was surprised to see the commander smile into the radio.

Taki opened his mouth to tell him it was a job well done before Klaus spoke again.

_‘Taki.’_

His tone made Taki’s smile vanish.

* * *

The basement level was much larger than the factory upstairs. It receded into the distance under rows of blinking fluorescent lights. Klaus stared at the hundreds of large cylindrical canisters. At the rows of vaults lining the room with small square windows set into them and heavy metal handles. All of which were marked in huge, angry red warnings.

The words were preceded by a symbol Klaus had never seen before – a fan shape with three blades – but nevertheless bred a sinister sort of anxiety. Below the symbols were the written warnings themselves. At first, Klaus struggled with the unfamiliar kanji. And then he saw words printed in his own language. And a half-dozen other languages.

 _‘What is it?’_ Taki’s voice asked through the radio.

_DANGER. RADIOACTIVE._

Klaus took a breath.

‘Ready for something new?’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hanairoh and I joke that this story should be called ‘Everyone is in love with Klaus’. In chronological order we have: half the female population of Klaus’ old boarding school, Greta Scholz, Hans Regenwalde, Taki Reizen, Haruki Yamamoto, Heidi Reinhart and Emperor Meiji.
> 
> To be fair, Taki has his share of admirers too: Klaus, Hans, Izumi the media liaison guy, Eva, Rudi, the teenage girls he held the door open for, the girl he turned down at the dance. Suguri, probably (joking).
> 
> But yeah, everyone falls for Klaus von Wolfstadt. I think the entire MR fandom can empathise…
> 
> Anyway, the real reason for this author’s note is to apologise for the latest political development and to explain that I’m not searching for new things to throw at our boys just because I get bored (the newest being nuclear power). There is a plan behind all this, I promise. If this were a proper cover-to-cover book, you guys could keep reading and see that it’s going somewhere and I could stop bothering you with author’s notes. (Sorry!)
> 
> Thank you so much again to everyone for reading! I know I always say this but I’m constantly overwhelmed by all the support and love. I’m so lucky to have such an insightful and responsive group of readers! <3
> 
> Also wanted to mention a quick but massive THANK YOU to my relatively new reader LBx who is a living, breathing textbook on Japanese history and politics (which means I now get to run things by LBx before I continue doing what is technically known as ‘making stuff up and rewriting history’ haha).
> 
> Next chapter (less politics, more sex) in a few days Xx


	30. Instead of Wisteria Trees

_ONE MONTH LATER_

It was only too easy to imagine how everything could have spun out of control. Especially when they slowly began to discover the extent of this new, looming threat. How far it reached. And so Taki was glad of the decision they made. He knew it was their burden to shoulder.  

But it didn’t ease the fact that he hadn’t seen Klaus for two long weeks.

The wisteria sprig was soft in his hand. He twirled it gently between his fingers, taking care not to crush the petals. He observed their delicate, almost improbable heart-like shapes and the little yellow flame at their centre; a secret that was hidden behind the violet.

Summer was fast approaching. The heat already lay thick over the Reizen residence. Taki loosened his tie and stared out across the grounds and the sparkle of the lake in the distance. He lifted his gaze to the sky and wished he could stare through to the other side. To see what Klaus was doing at that moment.

He then heard soft, familiar footsteps on the gravel path behind him a little ways up the hill.

‘Onii-chan!’

Seven-year-old Midori, the youngest of the Reizen daughters, came into view around the trunk of the wisteria tree, slightly out of breath.

Her face fell.

‘Oh. Is Klaus-chan still gone?’

Taki’s heart warmed when he heard the diminutive form, a habit her minders had stopped trying to scold out of her, and one that Klaus, for his part, seemed to enjoy immensely anyway.

‘Yes.’

She sat in a huff beside her brother, sending some fallen petals scattering. Her hair was getting long, Taki noticed.

‘When will he be back?’

‘Soon.’

_I hope._

‘Is he still in the west?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that where he came from?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he lives here with us now?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come?’

Taki paused for a moment.

‘He’s my knight,’ he explained quietly for the first time. ‘That means we’ll be together for the rest of our lives.’

‘A knight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

She considered the thought with wide eyes and looked back up at Taki.

‘Do you think I could have a knight too when I’m old enough?’

Taki smiled again. Heinrich suddenly came to mind. The thought surprised him; he didn’t consider himself whimsical enough for it.

‘You could, yes.’

She seemed pleased at the idea.

‘You and Klaus-chan really like this tree, huh, Nii-chan?’ she observed, her tone sprightly. She lay back in the grass. ‘You’re always here.’

Midori and her sisters always managed to find them there, though neither Taki nor Klaus minded particularly. Klaus once told him that their laughter reminded him of little bells.

In the week that Taki had Klaus had spent at the residence before Klaus had been sent to the west, there were a handful of times when they were able to steal away to the tree. Midori was exaggerating about how often it happened; it was difficult to find time between Taki’s duties as shogun on the estate and being called to the capital by the emperor.

Oftentimes, when they did find a few hours alone together, Klaus simply lay with his head in Taki’s lap, and Taki would lean back against the trunk.

At some point, it had occurred to Taki that he was subconsciously trying to recreate the peace of the cottage. He would stare at Klaus’ face, his closed eyes and slightly curved lips, and wonder if he was doing the same.

Perhaps not, Taki thought. Klaus, after all, had had over a year to come to terms with being away from home. Perhaps it was Taki, alone, who felt the tug of nostalgia so strongly.

‘How come you didn’t go with Klaus-chan this time?’ Midori asked, cutting into his reverie. ‘Didn’t you like it in the west?’

Taki suddenly felt a lump rise to his throat.

‘I liked it very much.’

‘More than here?’

Taki turned to her in surprise. He reminded himself that she was seven and that she was asking a seven-year-old’s question.

‘Of course not,’ he said carefully.

‘Even if you did, I wouldn’t mind,’ Midori said unexpectedly.

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘Nope! Because then, if Onii-chan lived in the west, I could come to the west to visit Onii-chan.’ Her eyes were bright with her new idea. ’And when I’m in the west to visit Onii-chan, I could find my knight too!’

No matter where they came from or how they were raised, Taki thought, his mind on Heinrich again, children seemed to have a kind of pure logic and single-minded resolve that never failed to amaze him.

‘Knights don’t have to come from the west, Imouto-chan,’ he explained gently.

‘But the tall ones do, right? The ones with yellow hair?’

Taki’s smile turned into a small laugh.

‘Yes. Those ones do.’

* * *

_ONE MONTH EARLIER_

‘The west is building nuclear weapons too.’

Tachibana observed with satisfaction how his words stunned his audience. Even the emperor’s eyes flashed.

‘I assume you have no intelligence of this, Your Majesty,’ Tachibana continued. He was proud to note that, despite the circumstances under which he had been brought to the palace, his voice hadn’t altered in the slightest. ‘That isn’t surprising considering they are only rumours. But I personally believe those rumours to be true. It was a topic I tried to broach on numerous occasions with the previous emperor. I tried to explain that it was worth investigating, but His Majesty did not share my concern.’

‘And so you decided to build your own without the knowledge of either His Majesty or myself?’

The emperor’s tone was colder than anyone had ever heard before. They were in the throne room. Tachibana knelt before the emperor, flanked by the Imperial Guard. Taki, Klaus and the members of the Fifteenth Armoured Division stood nearby.

‘I humbly beg your forgiveness, Your Grace,’ Tachibana said. ‘I can understand how it appears. But I assure you, I was doing this for Your Grace. For our nation.’

‘And how is that?’

‘If Your Grace has been briefed about the power of this technology –’

‘I have.’

Klaus and his team infiltrated Tachibana’s weapons complex the previous day. Since then, the emperor had been briefed by scientists and weapons experts about the exact nature of the technology he had been developing.

Taki himself had walked through the basement level of the factory, with an uneasy Klaus on his heels. One side of the room was lined with tall metal work benches piled with scientific equipment they couldn’t even begin to identify. The experts that had been summoned were falling over themselves when they examined each piece of equipment and the detailed, lengthy notes.

But Taki was more concerned with the waist-high canisters that stood in neat rows, each bearing the nuclear warning, filing away to the far end of the basement. Like a silent, deadly army.

Tachibana’s scientists themselves had been tracked down and interrogated. The head of the team was Otto Hanovich, the famous Eurotean physicist who had fled hostilities in Eurote during the war and was presumed dead. Tachibana claimed to have given him refuge in exchange for his services.

‘Since Hanovich’s experiments in nuclear fission became well-known in Eurote years ago, I suspect that the west followed suit,’ Tachibana continued. ‘It won’t take them long to weaponise the science, Your Majesty.’

Early reports on Tachibana’s stockpile had flooded in from the experts; the technology was highly advanced but not weapons-grade yet. The potential, however, was there. A few more innovations, some improvements in mobility and stability, and it could easily change the nature of warfare as the world knew it.

I was so close, Tachibana thought sourly.

‘The only thing that will prevent our enemies from using these weapons is the threat of retaliation,’ he insisted calmly. ‘My only desire, Your Grace, was to perfect the technology and lay it at Your Grace’s feet. For our country’s protection against those in the west.’

‘The west is no longer a threat,’ Taki said.

It was the first time he had spoken since Tachibana was brought before the emperor.

Klaus looked at him.

So did Tachibana, whose gaze was still serene.

‘For now,’ he replied smoothly.

Taki stared back, reviled by the thought of any harm coming to the fields of gold. To the waterfall and the hidden clearing.

‘I want it all decommissioned,’ Meiji said. All eyes turned to him again. ‘Every weapon. In every warehouse. Immediately.’

His tone, hard-edged and final, seemed to reflect Taki’s abhorrence. He felt a wave of gratitude.

* * *

All kinds of investigations were launched, both scientific and military, both at home and abroad. Klaus lost track of the number of meetings they were summoned to in the capital. Meiji would sit at the head of a massive table surrounded by advisors and experts and Klaus would often feel out of his depth.

He found himself almost nostalgically thinking about how it all started with just himself and Taki and Meiji in the emperor’s sitting room. He remembered how the attendant had removed the emperor’s headdress. He remembered how the emperor had complained about Natsume, who, it turned out, had waited silently outside the door the entire time, still uncomfortable about leaving the emperor alone.

‘He means well,’ Meiji had sighed. ‘But he’s been my bodyguard since I was shogun and he’s only serving as the head of the guard until I find someone permanently. I’ve been screening possible candidates for a while. My counsel thinks I’m being too picky.’

And he had smiled. At himself, at Natsume, at his counsel – Klaus couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter.

Now, as the emperor listened to advice from around the table, Klaus realised he hadn’t seen his enigmatic smile for the last few meetings. Though the situation called for sobriety, it saddened him in a way he didn’t expect. He thought of Taki and wondered again about the mask of duty. The burden of it.

That day, the meeting centred on the situation abroad. Leaders around the world had been notified of the new developments.

And the replies had been surprising.

‘Eurote is cooperating,’ Meiji announced. ‘Rossi has said he’ll investigate whether Mussolin was developing any weapons while he was Chancellor. I told him I was grateful for his cooperation, given the problems he seems to be having with the new civil unrest in his country.’

Klaus wondered if he had misjudged the man who reminded him of an old lion.

‘Several nations in the west, however,’ Meiji continued, ‘have been… evasive. They are neither confirming nor denying the development of nuclear technology, for military purposes or otherwise.’

This had inspired another ominous silence.

Was it possible, Taki wondered, that the west had taken their defeat in the war far less lightly than he had imagined?

After the entire table had pored over the details for hours, it became clear that a proper recon ground mission was needed, one for each nation in the west. Including Klaus’.

Klaus glanced at Taki, who sat beside him at the table.

Taki understood the look. He suddenly remembered Klaus asking his permission to volunteer for Operation Hannibal.

_I could translate, intercept, bewitch, befuddle, amaze. You know, all the things I’m so good at. Being a Saxon is my one strength here and I want to use it._

No words were needed. Taki sighed inwardly and nodded once.

Klaus spoke up for the first time and volunteered to head the mission in his home country. Meiji looked down the table at him and Klaus was pleased to see him smile.

* * *

It was the first time they were apart since Klaus had found him, broken and bleeding, in an ancient basement in No Man’s Land.

Even though their separation brought about memories of missions during the war, several things made it easier this time around. For one, Taki knew Klaus wasn’t in any physical danger. It was proper recon, not infiltration, and Klaus would only be scouting possible sites and using his connections to spy on leaders and ministers. The absolute worst that could happen was his getting arrested.

More importantly, they were able to speak on the phone every few days. They were careful never to discuss the mission in case the phone line was intercepted and so the calls were usually unnecessary. But Taki derived a great deal of comfort just from hearing his voice.

 _‘I miss you,’_  Klaus would say almost every time.

Taki would grip the phone a little tighter while his chamberlain, Ogura, watched on in concern.

‘Be safe,’ he would reply.

* * *

That night, hours after he had explained knighthood to his youngest sister beneath the wisteria tree, Taki lay in bed and thought about the day that he and Klaus left the Fifteenth Armoured Division for good and arrived at the Reizen residence.

Taki, feeling nervous, had watched Klaus put the suitcase beside his raised futon and walk towards the large window overlooking the grounds.

‘Where’s your room?’ he asked.

Taki hesitated.

‘In the left wing,’ he said. ‘It’s… down the hall. Around the corner.’

Klaus turned and his eyes glinted.

‘Better than the walk from my shed to your room in the compound.’

Two weeks later, Taki still remembered that glint in his eye.

He remembered Klaus crawling between his legs in that very bed, his hands palming Taki’s thighs, bending low to take his nipple into his mouth. His fringe had brushed Taki’s chest, feather-light.

Alone in his bed, one that suddenly seemed too large, Taki let out a small sigh and curled further into himself, trying to think of something else. Anything else.

But in only a matter of seconds, he was hard.

Moonlight peeked through the gap in the curtains. Crickets screeched in the darkness beyond. And Taki blushed in his solitude.

He had faced this particular battle before in his youth. His duties and his vows of purity were clear enough. However, the rules regarding celibacy itself and exactly what restrictions one had to place on oneself were less clear.

Regardless of the ambiguity in the fine print, Taki had always refrained. Purity, a young Taki had once decided, meant exactly that.

Luckenwalde had changed everything almost overnight.

As he lay on his side beneath the covers, he suddenly imagined a large pair of arms circling him from behind. Pulling him against a broad chest.

And slowly, face still flushed, feeling strangely humiliated despite everything he and Klaus had done together, he eased his hand beneath the hem of his jinbei. He tried as hard as he could to imagine his own hand as Klaus’.

_You’re already leaking so much._

The words came to him in Klaus’ voice and in Klaus’ language. Taki closed his eyes and sighed again, his hand sliding more firmly over his cock.

_What are you thinking about?_

He stroked quicker, his breath coming out in bursts.

_Are you thinking about my cock? Are you thinking about me being inside you again?_

The heat and size of it. The way it seemed to fill him completely with every thrust. He almost moaned.

_Are you thinking about me fucking you hard, lying here like this? Hitting that spot inside you. Hitting it so hard that you –_

When he came, he did in fact let out a soft moan.

Even after his breathing steadied and he had self-consciously cleaned himself up with a tissue from his nightstand, he realised his cheeks were still hot. He turned his face into the pillow.

* * *

When Klaus called and told him he was hours away from boarding the train and would arrive in three days, Taki’s heart soared.

It fell again when he received word that there was a delay on the tracks due to maintenance.

It fell even further when he realised this delay would mean Klaus would return during a quorum at the Reizen residence where leaders from across the country would gather to discuss Tachibana and the situation at the capital.

He sat in his formal robes in the main hall surrounded by the other shoguns and had to summon every ounce of self-control in order to focus on the matter at hand. He furiously hoped it would be over soon and they would leave before Klaus returned.

‘I worry what this will mean for us,’ Ayabe, leader of the adjacent province, was saying. ‘That Tachibana could do something like this under our noses. It will make the emperor nervous about the power of the shogunate.’

Taki turned to him.

‘Maybe His Majesty should be worried,’ he said, voicing something that he hadn’t even realised he had thought about properly.

Even with the new threat of other nations developing nuclear technology, he hadn’t forgotten the emperor’s fear of civil war, nor Tachibana’s strange reply about protecting his own interests.

‘Maybe we should consider giving up some of our rights as leaders of our estates.’

‘But Taki-sama,’ said Ayabe nervously. Though the young prince had expressed some unorthodox views in the past, he had never before been so bold. ‘That would mean changing how we’ve done things for generations.’

‘We can’t be held back by the old ways alone,’ Taki argued.

 _We can’t be held back by the old ways alone_ , he thought vaguely, his mind drifting yet again to Klaus. _Surely the gods will forgive us._

His thoughts were interrupted when Ogura entered the hall, looking a little agitated.

‘My deepest apologies,’ the chamberlain said, bowing low to the leaders. ‘But, Taki-sama, it appears –’

Klaus burst through the door before Ogura finished, his tie flying behind him.

* * *

Taki felt a flare leap from his chest straight to his head.

‘Klaus…’

Without even properly excusing himself, he rose from his cushion and went towards the door. Klaus met him halfway, eyes locked on Taki, his mouth curved downwards.

‘I’m sorry, Taki-sama,’ Ogura called from behind him. ‘I tried telling Lord Wolfstadt that you were in a meeting –’

Though Klaus had coped with their separation as well as could be hoped, his mood had turned dangerously sour since the day-long delay on the train. And the final string had been plucked and broken when he jumped from the jeep in front of the residence only to be told by Ogura that Taki might not be available for another few hours.

Seeing Taki’s face again had soothed the thing inside him that was snarling and feral. He had imagined those dark, piercing eyes every night before he slept.

But there was still a growl lurking somewhere else. Somewhere urgent. And it raised its voice when he saw the way Taki was looking at him. The way he approached in those flowing robes.

He was dimly aware of Ogura and the entire shogunate watching somewhere far away. And so all he did was take Taki’s arm and pull him close enough to speak into his ear. The scent of roses did nothing to calm him down.

‘Make an excuse,’ he whispered, his voice hoarse.

It was a hoarseness that Taki recognised.

‘What?’ he said, slightly breathless.

‘Make an excuse,’ Klaus said again, more emphatically. His eyes bored into Taki’s. ‘Now.’

Taki stared back for a second or two and felt his face begin to flush. He turned to face the room at large.

‘I beg your forgiveness, my lords,’ he said, his voice surprisingly firm. ‘But my knight has just returned from his mission with urgent news. I need to be briefed.’

Their surprised murmurs of acquiescence fell only on Ogura’s ears. Taki and Klaus left the room without a backwards glance.

* * *

Lips and tongues meshed with an urgency that Taki hadn’t known before.

‘Finally,’ Klaus hissed. ‘I finally get to taste you. I thought I was going to go mad on the train.’

They were pressed up against the wall only a few turns away from the hall where the quorum was. Taki’s hands were pinned and Klaus was pressing himself into Taki’s robes. Taki was trapped so firmly between Klaus’ body and the wall that it was hard to breathe. He realised numbly that it had taken just over two weeks for him to have forgotten Klaus’ sheer size.

Suddenly Klaus lifted him up. He tried to wrap Taki’s legs around him but the thickly layered clothes stopped him from getting a grip. Taki slid back to the floor.

‘Fuck,’ Klaus growled.

Then they heard footsteps around the corner, most likely Ogura’s.

Klaus took his arm and pulled him out of sight.

A few short seconds later, they fell on Taki’s bed. Taki felt his lips beginning to swell beneath the onslaught of Klaus’ mouth. He felt Klaus’ hands roaming over his clothes, trying to find an opening.

Lips on his neck, warm breath and a hint of teeth. A groan mingled in with Taki’s loud sigh. His mind was already lost in fog. He could barely remember Klaus’ mission or the emperor or the quorum or anything beyond the way that Klaus’ strong jaw nuzzled his collarbone.

Klaus then lifted his hands to Taki’s face and loosened the binds under his chin. The headdress fell away. He tossed it to the floor where it clattered.

With his hands on either side of Taki’s shoulders, Klaus lifted up a little and stared. Taki panted beneath him, his cheeks red, and his robes flowing over the side of the bed. Klaus’ cock strained. He grit his teeth at the thought that somewhere beneath those layers was Taki’s small, white, lithe form waiting to be touched and marked.

‘I’ve always wanted to fuck you in those clothes.’

He slid both hands beneath Taki’s robes and tugged at the pants beneath, which came away surprisingly easily. The wine-rich colour of the robes against the pale flesh of Taki’s thighs was a sight that made his cock throb.

It felt distinctly like a reward for two weeks of abstinence.

Parting Taki’s legs, he delved down between the folds of his long haori. His fingers and tongue found their mark and heard the sound of Taki’s low, desperate moan. He spat and worked his fingers into Taki’s heat, breathing in his scent, occasionally tilting his chin up to run his tongue over his cock.

Taki squirmed above him, his back arched.

‘Nngh! Ff-! Klaus, ugh…’

Klaus knew he ought to spend more time preparing him. But less than a minute in, he straightened up again. The need to push his way into Taki’s body, as quickly and deeply as he could, was overpowering.

Taki opened his eyes. The sight of Klaus looming over him undoing his belt had never once lost its effect. His cock, huge and stiff and leaking, sprang out between the drooping folds of his fly.

Suddenly, Klaus grabbed his shoulder and hip and turned him onto his stomach. Feeling the breath knocked out of him yet again, he tried to shift his weight onto his elbows.

Klaus gathered the hem of his robes in fistfuls and hoisted them right up over his hips, exposing Taki completely. He lifted Taki onto his knees, took his cheeks in both hands and spread him wide.

Taki gasped.

‘Ready for me, Master?’ Klaus asked in a harsh, guttural undertone.

The word sent a shiver through Taki’s body which Klaus felt.

With one quick thrust, he pushed the head of his cock in.

‘ _Ah!_ ’

Taki felt the pain almost immediately. It was a burning that he hadn’t felt for a long time. But his need for Klaus was so great that he clenched his eyes shut and persevered.

‘Oh! Klau– _ugh!_ ’

At that moment, Klaus pushed his full length through and let out a deep groan. Aware that he hadn’t loosened Taki enough beforehand, he held himself there for long seconds, feeling Taki’s passage already beginning to milk him.

And then, with help from the pre-come that was pouring copiously, he pulled back and thrust in fully.

Taki’s moan was loud and almost mournful with pleasure.

‘So fucking tight,’ Klaus grunted. ‘So fucking good.’

He sped up his thrusts until he was slapping loudly against Taki’s flesh and watching how his robes rippled and shuddered and fell further up his back.

When Taki turned, it was just in time to see Klaus pause, the full length of his cock pressing into him right to the base, in order to pull his shirt up over his head and discard it, baring his arms and chest. Taki saw the way he looked back down at where their bodies were joined. Where Klaus had claimed what was his.

Klaus wiped the sweat from his face with his wrist before grabbing Taki’s hips so firmly it hurt and beginning to pound again.

Fists clenched on the sheets, Taki could only hold on and moan, a few tears leaking onto the bedspread. He realised his fantasies of Klaus, the ones he had indulged alone in that very bed, didn't come anywhere close to the intensity and ferocity of the real thing.

Right before they both came, Klaus flattened himself over the top of Taki, his stomach and chest pressing heavily onto Taki’s back, and pushed two of his fingers into Taki’s mouth.

He kissed Taki’s neck, thrust into him hard and felt Taki moan around his fingers.

‘Come with me,’ he ordered, his voice strained. ‘I want to feel you come while I fill you up.’

‘Mmmh! Ugh!’

‘Ah, oh fuck! I’m coming, Taki –!’

He bucked and tensed. Beneath him, Taki did the same.

When Klaus collapsed onto the bed beside Taki, both taking shuddering breaths, the snarling, growling beast had quietened and he was grateful for everything that had led to that moment, train delays included.

* * *

Soon afterwards, with a genial quip about not wanting to make a liar out of Taki in front of the shoguns, he did, in fact, brief him about the mission.

‘We didn’t find any trouble,’ he said, his arm thrown over his forehead, sweat still hanging in beads on his face. ‘But we didn’t find much of anything else, either.’

Taki pulled himself upright against the headboard, absently trying to straighten his robes. He felt a strange, pleasant soreness. His breathing was still staggered and he was still bemusedly happy at the simple fact that Klaus was back and lying in his bed.

But he managed to focus.

‘You didn’t find anything?’ he said between slight pants.

‘It’s hard to say. My people don’t trust me anymore. Only a few of my old connections gave up anything useful. But –’

He paused and looked at Taki. Though he was momentarily distracted by Taki's slightly swollen lips and dishevelled hair, he tried to condense what he had learned.

‘I really fucking hate to say it, but I think Tachibana’s right.’

His team had come to that disturbing conclusion not so much because of the evidence but because of the specific lack of evidence; the roadblocks that were put up whenever he tried to investigate.

‘On top of that, there’s whole chunks of information missing from public records. About government funding on military technology, nuclear research specifically. It’s all pointing to one thing.’

In the silence, birds chirped obliviously to one another beyond the curtained window. Taki stared at the bronze skin of Klaus’ arms, his eye drawn again to the glossy bullet scar.

‘But, believe it or not, there is good news,’ Klaus said. ‘From what little we gathered, we can at least be confident that their tech is like Tachibana’s. Not combat ready. They’re all still tinkering with their new goddamn terrifying toys.’

‘But how can we know how close they are to –?’

‘I know. We can’t know. But the west is still in deep financial shit since the war. And they’re paying reparations. And I doubt they can handle the heat if the press gets wind of this kind of thing. So, I think…’ He stared at the far wall. ‘We’re in the clear. For now.’

For now.

‘Besides that, I’ve been thinking,’ Klaus continued. ‘You’ll call me either an idiot or an optimist. But _just_ maybe there’s a chance that, even if they develop the weapons, they won’t actually ever use them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe they’re doing what Tachibana said; building insurance in case a war breaks out again. Maybe we’ll all just point our guns at each other and, you know. Not shoot.’

As soon as he spoke, he remembered his standoff with the guards in the warehouse. Where everyone had miraculously emerged unscathed.

‘I can’t imagine it,’ Taki said after a moment’s consideration. ‘A world where nations like ours would build weapons like these and just… never use them.’

Klaus smiled at his seriousness.

‘No faith in humanity whatsoever, huh?’ he observed fondly. He took Taki’s hand and pulled gently until Taki slid back onto the bedspread and rested against him. ‘Can’t say I blame you, really.’

Taki remained silent. His pessimism was such that he was almost mistrustful of their luck so far. Surely it seemed more in keeping with human nature for them to have descended into chaos? How long would their luck hold out?

‘Meiji-sama’s doing the right thing,’ Klaus said. ‘We’ll keep an eye on them. On everyone. Stop the war before it starts this time.’

Taki felt his breath ruffling the top of his hair. He lifted a hand to Klaus’ chest. He tried not to think about his dream again. How the wolf’s eyes had glowed the same colour as the fire that enveloped the world.

‘What if we fail?’

There was a small silence.

‘Then we fail. We’ve done all we can.’ He flicked his eyes to the top of Taki’s head. ‘ _You’ve_ done all you can.’

‘But –’

‘It only takes two sides who want to fight. After that, if the world really wants to send itself to hell in a handbasket, there’s nothing much we can do.’

Taki thought about his words for a long time. He couldn’t figure out if they were nihilistic or realistic.

‘But you know,’ Klaus said, his tone different. ‘Being here. With you and the girls. Sometimes running off if Meiji-sama asks us to. Occasionally trying to save the world.’ Taki could hear his smile. ‘It’s not such a bad deal, is it? Especially if I get to come home to you like this.’

* * *

Home.

Home, which now seemed to summon a different set of images. Wheat fields instead of wisteria trees.

'What's wrong?' Klaus asked, picking up on his tiny shift in mood.

 _This is home,_ Taki told himself. _I’m home._

He then wondered, suddenly, whether this was it. After everything; after Luckenwalde and the war and Hans and the west. He wondered whether this, here, was their ending.

When the thought didn’t quite land, when he felt it echo strangely, he was grateful for the arms that reached around and circled him.

'Taki?'

But he didn't know how to reply.


	31. The Second Letter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Muchas gracias to the wonderful KatBlack for her words of wisdom regarding this little chapter Xxx

_Hello little brother,_

_I’m glad you told me you were in the west, even if you didn’t get a chance to visit. How did your assignment go that you can’t tell me about? Did you save the world once more?_

_It’s probably a good thing you didn’t swing by because I don’t know that Heinrich could have handled having to say goodbye to you again. After you and Taki left, he was a little terror for two whole days! I'm sure you're pleased to hear he’s even starting to throw tantrums like his uncle. Thank goodness his father bought him a new model airplane, one that looks a lot like the ones you used to fly (which is a big step for Wilhelm!), which made Heinrich bounce back immediately._

_I’m writing you with bittersweet news. Wilhelm has been offered a job in the capital. His work in the mines was apparently noticed by his superiors and they recommended him to a company in the city. He’s always been impressive with machines; you remember how much time he and Taki spent on the combine._

_We’re all sad to be leaving the cottage and the farm. But being in the city means I’ll be closer to doctors, which will be useful in case I ever have a relapse. Plus, the increase in Wilhelm’s salary is considerable. And the children are excited about life in the city._

_I know you passed the house to us when you left with Taki. But I still feel guilty about selling it without letting you know first. We already have a few bidders who have made some excellent offers._

_I’m sorry, Klaus. I hope this doesn’t come as unwelcome news. I’ll make sure the cottage passes into good hands._

_I hope everything is well with you. How is Taki? I’m sure he’s relieved to be back home, especially after having to deal with farm life like a common peasant! Sometimes I still wonder if I dreamt that the young prince came here at all._

_I hope the two of you are happy. I miss you both._

_Sending love from the whole family, including Heinrich who is beside me and insisting that I sign him off as Wolverine._

_Love,_

_Claudia_

* * *

_Dear Claudia,_

_It’s good to hear from you. I’m glad it sounds like everyone is doing well. Tell Wolverine that he’s well on his way to becoming the next generation's Lycanthrope and I couldn’t be prouder._

_The assignment went well. Of course the world was saved – they sent me._

_I appreciate your letting me know about the cottage. I understand completely. It will be sad to see it go, but I’m sure it will be well looked after, as you said._

_Taki’s doing fine. The Reizen residence is beautiful – you probably remember it too. Taki’s sisters keep the place lively. We’re all happy._

_My best to Wilhelm and the kids. Or maybe just the kids._

_Love,_

_Klaus_

* * *

_Dear Claudia,_

_It’s good to hear from you. I’m glad it sounds like everyone is doing well. Tell Wolverine that he’s well on his way to becoming the next generation's Lycanthrope and I couldn’t be prouder._

_The assignment itself went well, but what we uncovered has cast a heavy shadow. It’s a long story that would lead to some trouble both here and abroad if any details got out._

_So, of course, I’ll tell you everything right now._

_It begins with someone named Tachibana, the leader of a province in Taki’s country. He's spent the past two years secretly developing weapons that could, potentially, wipe out life on the planet. At first, we thought he was trying to stage a coup to become emperor. He maintains that he only did it because the west is also building weapons, and so he took it upon himself to protect the east._

_(Taki and I both highly doubt he’s as selfless as he claims, but at least we’ve stopped whatever he might have been scheming. Taki is now worried about how power is divided in this country if Tachibana could do something like this without anyone noticing. The emperor shares his concern.)_

_Anyway, in case Tachibana wasn’t lying through his teeth, I was sent to the west to see if our country is also developing this technology. They are. They’re not ready to weaponise, thank God, but they’re slowly working on it. Maybe in the next decade. Maybe never._

_These weapons, Claudia. They make me dread the kind of future we might be in for. Taki's rattled too. I wish I could tell you there was nothing to be alarmed about. You can take comfort in the fact that, for now, there isn’t._

_There’s also some drama in Eurote, but I’m sure you’ve got enough to mull over as it is._

_About the cottage._

_When I read that it’s going to be sold, I had to sit down. It feels a little like there’s a stone in my heart. I can't really explain why, being a grown man with his own home thousands of miles away._

_Of course it makes sense for you to move. I just wish it didn’t have to mean that we lose the farm. Since I’m never sending this letter, I hope you’ll let me have my Heinrich-like tantrum where no one will see it._

_Speaking of things I wish. I wish I could settle here properly. There are times I’ve come close. But Taki…_

_Taki has a lot on his mind. Again. And I’m doing all I can to share the burden. But I thought, after everything we’ve been through, his preoccupation wouldn’t mean he'd shut me out again._

_It’s like the war, in a way. I thought it was over, but new things just keep cropping up. I feel like it'll never end._

_There are little questions he refuses to answer. And times when he turns away. I_ _wish I knew why. Maybe, this time, it's for a different reason – one that I could never guess._

_Or maybe it's still me. Maybe I'm still not patient enough or observant enough. I wonder if he's tired of how hard I am to control. Maybe I've hurt him one too many times._

_I can hear your advice. You’re saying I should stop feeling sorry for myself and focus on everything that we do have. You’re probably right, as usual._

_We’re better in a lot of ways. It amazes me sometimes when I think about how lost we were a year ago. There are times now where I feel like we’re even thinking the same thing without needing to speak. And I can see the changes in his mood, even if I don’t understand what causes them. And when we’re alone together it’s usually wonderful._

_I should count my blessings. I should stop wishing I could read his mind. (There's a story there, by the way, that I can't fit in a letter. I'll tell you about it one day, even though you won't believe me.)_

_I wish I could say we’re happy. We’re close to it. We’re always close._

_My best to Wilhelm and the kids. Tell your husband I said congratulations on the job._

_I miss you too._

_Klaus_

* * *

Sitting on his bed next to a square patch of sunlight on the quilt, chin in hand, Klaus slowly read over the second letter he would never send.

His eyebrows were arched and his lips drawn into a wry smile over his impressive powers of self-indulgence. Not to mention the carefree way he shared incriminating state secrets that posed a threat to national security and international diplomacy.

And then gradually, over the next few seconds, his smile faded.

Somewhere in the house, Taki was getting ready for a meeting with government ministers. The girls were at their lessons. All was quiet.

‘Fuck it,’ Klaus said abruptly.

He sent the second letter.


	32. Entire Flocks of Herons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things Dionys promised back in the day:
> 
> Part 2 won’t be as angst-filled as Part 1.  
> Part 2 won’t be as action-packed or politically-driven as Part 1.  
> Part 2 won’t be as long as Part 1.
> 
> Lol. This is why Dionys should never become a politician. (Or would make a great politician, depending on how cynical you are.)
> 
> In my defence, I genuinely thought all of the above was true when it was sitting in my head. On paper, it sort of got away from me. Especially the length. ("I can totally fit the discovery of nuclear weapons and secret recon missions and quorums and sex and Taki’s new nostalgia-angst into half a chapter. Oh wait, no I can’t.") Hope you're bearing with it, everyone. We’re almost at the climax of Part 2.
> 
> You won’t be bothered by author’s notes again until the end of Part 2, which should happen by the end of Chapter 39. Hopefully. Unless that becomes broken promise number four.
> 
> Thank you in all ways and in all languages for reading! If you’re enjoying even a tiny bit, then it will all have been worth it! Xx

Taki held out his arms to allow the chambermaid to slip his haori over his shoulders. Two others straightened the hem of his robes. In another wing of the house, Hebe, the second-oldest of his sisters, was practicing the koto. The dewdrop notes sounded pleasantly throughout the residence, wafting in and out of the windows as though part of the breeze itself. It was a fairly typical scene in the Reizen household; one that Taki had known for many years before leaving for Luckenwalde. 

The only notable difference now were the golden eyes that occasionally caught Taki’s gaze in the full length mirror before him. Klaus sat at Taki's desk on the far side of the room and watched with fascination as all the various components of Taki's wardrobe were put together.

So much less effort to take off, he thought.

Taki felt nervous, wondering what had compelled him to let Klaus stay when his attendants knocked that morning. He spared a glance at how Klaus leaned back in the seat, right ankle on his left knee and arms folded. A sly smile playing on his lips.

One of the attendants looped a sash around his waist and tied it behind him.

_Have you ever asked him?_

Hans' question filled his mind again, this time alongside memories of roses sparkling with fresh dew in the garden behind the cottage.

_What it's like to have given everything up for you?_

No, he hadn't. And now that he had experienced for himself a fragment of what Klaus had given up, it seemed like hypocrisy and injustice of the highest order to speak of his feelings. Despite having come a long way since the war, these feelings were new. And he needed to come to terms with them before he spoke them aloud.

_I miss the west. I miss being with you at the cottage. I dream of the colours and the smells. I want to shut my eyes to all of this and be there with you again, even if only for a little while. On the other side._

He knew his thoughts were no different to those of a petulant child whose small, insular world had been thrown open to something new, yet again by Klaus, and who was struggling to deal with having it taken from him. So he remained silent until he could learn to accept that he and Klaus were where they were supposed to be.

He began to avoid going near the wisteria tree, even when he had an hour or two to spare and knew Klaus would most likely be there, his long body stretched out on the grass and his arms behind his head.

There were little questions Taki would refuse to answer. There were times when he turned away.

He knew Klaus could see it. And hoped he would give him a little more time.

* * *

The headdress was carefully attached and Taki remained as still as he could.

Klaus watched him and wondered whether or not to bring it up.

It had been a week since he sent the second letter. Claudia had already replied. But given the way Taki had been recently, Klaus didn't know if it would be something he cared about. Especially because bringing up memories of their time in the west always seemed a sure-fire way to make Taki clam up. As though he was trying to say he didn't have time for trivial jaunts down memory lane.

Still, Klaus felt he had to tell someone.

'Claudia wrote me last week.' He tried to keep his tone casual. ‘The family's moving to the city. She told me they were selling the cottage.'

It was almost instinctual how quickly Taki's mind raced ahead. Buying the property was conceivable. As was hiring workers to care for the farm. True, the idea was several shades of ridiculous, given how infrequently they would be able to go back and make any real use of it. But the land would be his and Klaus'. Technically, it would he his alone, since Klaus wasn't permitted to have any land or titles under his name. But it would be theirs. Theirs. So that, on the rare occasion that Taki's duties permitted -

'They sold it already,' Klaus said. 'She told me in the letter I got this morning. The new owners moved in and everything. Can you believe it?'

Taki let out a short exhale. One of his attendants glanced up in concern, worried the sash was on too tight. Klaus didn't notice. His eyes were suddenly on the floor.

'It feels kind of surreal. Someone else living there. Working the fields. Sitting in the rose garden.' A thought occurred to him. 'That's if they even keep the garden. They could do whatever they want with it. They could bulldoze the whole thing to the ground.'

Small tendrils of sorrow curled into Taki's mind.

'Kind of sad, isn't it?' said Klaus.

He immediately regretted his tone, which sounded almost hopeful. As though he secretly wished for Taki to find the news upsetting.

'I suppose,' Taki said curtly, looking steadily into his own eyes in the mirror.

He hoped he had covered up his tiny, irrational heartbreak.

Klaus waited for a long time until it became painfully clear that Taki had already exhausted his thoughts on the subject. He was both unsurprised and a little heartbroken. Tiny, irrational heartbreak, he thought dryly. Heartbreak in a teacup.

When Taki was fully dressed, he turned slowly and managed to bring himself to look Klaus in the eye.

'Ready to go?'

Klaus reminded himself that he had vowed to withstand the cold currents. He uncrossed his arms and smiled.

'Me? You're the one who needs a small city of people to help you get dressed.'

Taki didn't smile but the joke came as a welcome relief to them both. It allowed them both to pretend that their minds weren't filled with the vibrant colours of a small clearing and the sound made by a tiny creek as it jumped from mossy step to step.

* * *

In almost the same vein as the wind-down in the Fifteenth Armoured Division, several things were slowing coming to a close in the capital. In the general meeting at the Imperial Palace, Meiji announced the formation of a committee, a joint task force that would combine the best minds in political and military strategy, devoted to protecting the world from the threat of nuclear war.

‘The committee will work solely under my authority and we will take on board all of your findings and hard work. You have the sincerest thanks of the emperor for your services to this nation.’

His eyes paused briefly on Klaus and Taki, as though to tell them that they had done more than enough.

Klaus' heart soared for a fleeting moment before he brought it back. It sounded, quite possibly, as though they were no longer needed. By then, however, Klaus knew better than to get overly excited about any hint that he would, finally, be able to settle down with Taki. If he had learned anything by then, something would inevitably come up.

Afterwards, Meiji called the royal quorum to order, one that gathered all leaders across all provinces together for the first time at the Imperial Palace. For this, Klaus left Taki alone and spent an idle and rather enjoyable few hours exploring the palace grounds.

With the aid of a few herrings wrapped in newspaper which he procured from a blushing kitchen maid, he even managed to coax the heron out from its nest in the rushes and was surprised to find it was quite tame and even seemed to enjoy his company.

* * *

‘The way I see it,’ the emperor said, ‘since the end of the war, peace is settling over the world like a broad, white sheet. And where it lands, it’s showing where there are still little pebbles and protrusions.’

On the other side of the pond, Meiji and Taki took their leave of the quorum and walked slowly towards the residential compound. Their robes dragged slightly on the ground in a way that Taki had always found rather pleasant. Grounding.

The wisdom of Meiji’s words made Taki feel somewhat idealistic for having expected otherwise. He reminded himself that it had all started with the war. If the west hadn’t lost so profoundly, they wouldn’t have felt the need to insure themselves against future wars. And that war itself came from trickles and grudges held and lingering greed from the war before. And so on. He remembered a thought he had once had about the only legacy of war. Violence even after the violence was over. To which he now added saying he had found in Klaus' book; that only the dead see its end.

Pebbles and protrusions beneath the white sheet of peace. Pebbles which, most recently, took the form of civil unrest in Eurote. It was unclear at that point why there was an increase in protests against Minister Andrea Rossi. But with the possibility that Mussolin may have been stockpiling weapons as well, any volatility in Eurote was cause for concern.

For the sake of better relations between their nations, the emperor had arranged to meet with Rossi in the Eurotean capital the following week.

‘I would be much obliged if you and Klaus would accompany me,’ the emperor said. ‘I could use both your military knowledge and political insights to get a gauge on the situation in Eurote.’

‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

‘The Nuclear Committee will be in force soon,’ the emperor mused. ‘And so, in a way, this little trip might be your final mission. It’s not exactly glamorous or symbolic, since it’s only a diplomatic trip. Regardless, it will be the final thing your country asks of you.’

Their final mission.

Taki’s heart gave a single loud throb at the thought. However, like Klaus, he knew better than to be swept away by the implications.

* * *

'Claudia's reply was longer than the Treaty of Algernon,' Klaus told the heron after they had gotten acquainted. 'But two things stood out the most. Know what they were?'

The heron bent its neck at an impossible angle to pick at something between the feathers on its back.

'The first was that we should be grateful for all kinds of peace. Even unsteady peace. I guess she was talking about politics and... and other things.'

He tossed his audience another herring to hold its attention.

'She also reminded me of something our grandmother used to say. _All you need to be happy is something to do, someone to love and something to wish for._ '

 _I've always found that to be the case,_ Claudia had written. _And in a way, for you, Taki is all three, isn't he? Your duty to him and your love for him and the little things that keep coming up. Maybe what you have is real happiness and you're just not seeing it._

Something to wish for, Klaus thought. As an important ingredient of happiness. Interesting theory.

'What do you think?' he asked the heron.

Its cold round eye kept a sympathetic watch on Klaus and a closer watch on the newspaper-wrapped herring in his hand.

* * *

As they stepped down from the boardwalk onto the soft earth by the pond, the topic turned from international to domestic affairs.

‘So what are your thoughts on how much support my little motion has?’ Meiji asked.

The motion, which Meiji put to the quorum, was about the consolidation of power, almost total power, in the hands of the emperor. The latent fear that Tachibana working autonomously could have catapulted them into a nuclear arms race had struck several leaders. The shift in power would reduce the leaders to nothing more than extensions of the emperor – mere caretakers of their province.

‘I think about half the shogunate support the motion, Your Majesty,’ Taki assessed, his mind running through the discussions that had just taken place. ‘Myself included. The other half remain… reluctant.’

‘As they should be. As we only recently saw in Eurote, too much power lying in the hands of one leader presents its own problems.’ He smiled at Taki. ‘Tricky, isn’t it?’

‘It’s safer to place our faith in one leader, Your Grace, than worry about the prerogatives of twelve. I hope the other shoguns come to understand this too.’

Though there was an argument to be made both ways, Meiji was silently impressed with the young prince's political acumen.

‘I can certainly think of one fierce opponent.’

Although Tachibana hadn’t been invited to the royal quorum, he had retained his title and his province. Against the strong advice of Taki, Klaus and several of Meiji’s advisors, Tachibana’s covert activities hadn’t resulted in his being arrested.

‘Your Majesty, at the risk of repeating myself, I believe it would be wise to reconsider Tachibana’s –’

‘He was working well within the powers ascribed to him. It would have been unlawful of me to do anything to him. Besides, he has a family. A young son. One who kept an eye on your sisters while you were away in Luckenwalde, as I recall.’

Taki pressed his lips together guiltily, remembering the young Tachibana’s fierce promise to protect the Reizen daughters with his life.

‘There’s no use making early enemies,’ Meiji continued gently. ‘It would be more prudent to simply do away with the laws and customs that gave Tachibana so much power in the first place.’

They strolled over the arched bridge, accompanied by Natsume and the constant screech of the cicadas.

‘It’s somewhat ironic, isn’t it?’ Meiji reflected. ‘Only months ago, I was a shogun trying to avoid shouldering any real responsibility. And now, as emperor, I might end up having more power than any ruler since ancient times.’

‘You deserve it, Your Majesty,’ Taki replied without hesitation. He remembered how Klaus had once said that it was those who didn’t want power that are often the best suited to it.

He then thought of the quorum that would take place in the coming week while the emperor was in Eurote. Where Taki would have an opportunity to make the dissenting leaders see reason.

‘Your Majesty, maybe it would be best if I remained in the country next week. I would be another voice on the shogunate calling for change.’

‘A powerful one, at that,’ said Meiji, considering the thought. ‘If you think your presence here would be more valuable, I understand. I must say I will miss your unique skills and insights in Eurote. Yours and the captain’s.’

‘Captain Wolfstadt should still go with you, Your Grace. He would be more useful in Eurote than he would be here.’

Meiji was a little surprised.

‘Are you sure? I wouldn’t wish for you to be separated from your knight any more than you already have been.’

The thought of Klaus and Meiji together again inspired a strange surge of jealousy that Taki swatted back in frustration.

‘It’s fine,’ Taki said firmly, almost to himself. ‘We’re both committed to helping you, Your Majesty.’

They paused in the middle of the arched bridge where they had a picturesque view of the dappled water stretching away to the carefully pruned rushes and niwaki trees beyond.

‘If I may be so bold, Taki,’ the emperor began, almost casually. ‘I wonder if you harbour any personal reasons for wanting to give up so much of your duties and responsibilities?’

‘Personal reasons, Your Grace?’

‘Indeed.’

In the pause, thoughts of Klaus filled his mind. The time they would be able to spend together, with Taki unburdened of duty.

‘I – I’m not sure what Your Majesty is… referring –’

‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ Meiji said suddenly, his eyes in the distance and his head tilted slightly to the side. ‘But is that your knight on the opposite shore in the company of a heron?’

Startled, Taki followed his line of sight. A fair distance away, among the rushes, he spotted Klaus' bright hair and military jacket. He was crouched beside the slender frame of a tall, white bird. And he did, in fact, appear to be talking to it.

The bizarre sight set off a quick series of images in Taki’s mind. Klaus atop a chestnut mare. The way Ori had pushed her face into his palm as he petted her. How his voice had lifted in excitement when he tried to point out a fox. It was a side of him Taki hadn’t seen since the west.

With a faint blush and an even fainter smile, both of which the emperor noticed, he replied, ‘Yes, Your Majesty.'

* * *

_Something to wish for._

For Taki to tell him, freely and willingly, whatever it was that was weighing in his mind.

For this final mission to be over so they wouldn't be separated ever again.

For Taki to be his in every sense. For Taki to say so in three small words that would erase any lingering traces of doubt. So that Klaus would know that everything he had done had been done right by his master.

It seemed he would never be short of things to wish for. And perhaps, as Claudia said, it wasn’t necessarily a terrible thing.

The night before he was to leave for Eurote, he awoke to the feeling of a hand on his face. Fingers softly moving through his hair.

Taki lay awake beside him in the darkness, his eyes catching the midnight hour in deep pools. There was a new emotion written in them that made Klaus' breath catch for a split second.

'Sorry,' Taki said quietly. 'I didn't mean to wake you.'

But he didn't retract his hand.

His fingers traced Klaus’ forehead and jaw, with his thumb brushing down his smooth cheek, slowing down a little when it reached the stubble. For long moments, Klaus lay still, watching how Taki’s eyes roamed his face. Despite knowing he most likely had the following morning to thank for this show of tenderness, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the luckiest man alive.

He turned his head and kissed Taki’s palm.

‘Happy to be awake,’ he said in a rumble, his voice heavy from sleep.

Taki took a slow breath.

‘I know I’ve been somewhat… distant,’ he said. His voice was still barely above a murmur but the words, entirely unfamiliar and unlike him, came out of the blue. ‘I’m – I don’t mean to be.’

Klaus struggled to come up with a reply for a few seconds.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘But... you know you can tell me, right? Whatever it is.’

Taki hesitated.

‘I’m sorry about your cottage,’ he said carefully.

Klaus sighed in something like relief. He felt a small part of his uncertainties dispel. His master may not be in a sharing mood, but at least he cared.

‘Me too,’ he said.

Taki then moved closer and kissed his lips softly. It was the first time he’d done so since the day Klaus ran from a sudden downpour, holding an armful of kindling.

The Reizen residence was blanketed by the silence of the night.

Klaus basked in the honour of being there in the house where his young master had grown up, lying in his bed. Feeling his lips gently brushing against Klaus’.

The sheets rustled as he pulled Taki closer and rolled him onto his back.

He felt Taki’s body slowly mould around his cock when he pushed in. He heard Taki’s voice, felt his hands grip his hair, and was surprised to find he was eager, this time, to take his time.

Though nothing had quite measured up to the explosiveness of the sex that marked Klaus’ return from the west, nor the sex that had lasted hours when they were last together in Klaus’ shed in the compound, each time Klaus had taken Taki’s body, he had been unable to stop himself from taking all of Taki. In a lot ways, his ability to tether the wolf had only marginally improved. He sometimes wondered if he would know how to control himself if Taki ever told him to stop. 

So, in a way, neither expected Klaus to thrust in deep but slow, his eyes on Taki’s face, foreheads pressing together. He observed how Taki’s moans were subtly different. Breathier and less desperate.

For the first time, Klaus felt the sweetness of delayed gratification. He knew it was entirely in his power to choose the moment he would pull back and start hammering, forcing those sounds out from deep in Taki’s throat, to make him hold onto the sheets for leverage. For now, however, almost in homage to Taki’s emotional candour earlier, he was content to feel out the beats and pulses of this new pace.

He slid his tongue from the silky nibs of Taki’s nipples all the way down his abdomen, pausing to kiss the raised mark of his bullet wound. All the while, he slowly carved himself into Taki’s body, relishing the measured clench and release of Taki’s muscles. He worked his way back up and kissed Taki deeply.

‘Feel that?’ Klaus breathed in his ear. ‘I've been inside you so many times, your body knows the shape of my cock.’

Taki sighed, his eyebrows drawn in pleasure, and tilted his face away when Klaus kissed his neck.

The first sudden move Klaus made was one Taki didn’t at all expect. With a quick flip and shift in weight, Klaus lay on his back and Taki found himself straddling Klaus’ hips. When it became clear that Klaus wasn’t about to sit up and begin thrusting, Taki was suddenly at a loss. He leaned forward on his hands and felt Klaus slowly slide out of him until just the tip remained.

He avoided Klaus’ eye and tried to rock back so he could feel Klaus fill him again. But somehow, he couldn’t get the hang of the movement it required. He felt Klaus’ gaze burn a hole through him and he was entirely too self-conscious to try again.

‘Klaus…’ he said stiffly. Almost pleadingly.

Klaus grinned, his eyes narrow with pent-up lust, and ran both hands over Taki’s slender torso. He was almost happy to lie there, buried inside his beautiful master, seeing how his hair fell forwards onto his face and his lips parted with every breath.

Almost.

‘Want me to take over?’

Eyes still averted, cheeks flushed, Taki nodded.

The guilty look on his face inspired a small burst of colour in Klaus’ chest. He sat up and kissed him, pulled him forwards until Klaus was lying down again and Taki’s hair was brushing his cheeks. Taki felt strong hands grip his hips and tried to brace himself. As soon as he felt the mercilessness of the first upward thrust, Taki realised that he had done something that had unleashed the wolf yet again. He moaned and hung his head.

Afterwards, panting and feeling their way back down to Earth, they lay a little apart to allow the faint summer breeze wafting through the window to cool their bodies.

_Something to do. Someone to love._

Klaus reached over to brush Taki’s hair back from his eyes.

 _And something to wish for_.

Taki’s last thought before he drifted off was vague and, again, entirely unlike him. He decided that if it made Klaus even slightly happier, he would fill the Reizen grounds with horses, cats and foxes and fill the lake with entire flocks of herons.

* * *

The next morning, he accompanied Klaus as far as the emperor’s private airfield where Meiji had already boarded the small plane that would take them to Eurote.

The wind took advantage of the large, open plain to sweep over them in strong gusts. Klaus and Taki were reminded of the day when Klaus stood near the propellers of the _Arai._ It occurred to them both that, despite the upheaval of the past few weeks, everything had come a long way since that day. Both the world, with its new unsteady peace, as well as Klaus and Taki themselves.

Klaus stared at him and, paying no mind to the airfield workers who were nearby, Taki held his gaze.

Kneeling swiftly on the tarmac by Taki’s feet, Klaus took the hem of his coat his hand. Taki was suddenly lost in the sight; one he could see a thousand times over and would never lose its effect.

After pressing his lips to the fabric and holding it close to his chin, Klaus glanced up with a brash smile.

‘So,’ he said, the tail of his coat flying to the side. ‘Will you release me into the field one last time, my Master?’

Klaus’ words managed to carry the weight of the first time he had uttered those words, minutes before his outstretched hand grazed the side of Taki's tank and his bike tore off into No Man’s Land. Now, even on the eve of a diplomatic mission that didn’t carry the same weight in any respect, Taki was still grateful for his words. Words that bound them to one another again. His chest pooled with love and longing in equal measure.

‘Come back to me,’ he ordered quietly.

Klaus stood to his full height and kissed Taki’s hand in place of being able to kiss his lips. For a long while after he walked away and the plane taxied down the runway, Taki’s mind was filled with the way that the wind had moved short spikes of yellow hair.


	33. This Final Mission

On their first day in the Eurotean capital, after being shown to their rooms in Rossi’s mansion, Klaus was summoned to the emperor’s chambers.

‘I’ve asked Taki to go to the west on a diplomatic mission,’ Meiji told him without much preamble. ‘He’s already left and will be arriving by train in a few days.’

Meiji explained that the west had gotten wind of spies being sent across the border to dig around for nuclear secrets.

‘They’re only rumours,’ Meiji continued. ‘But evidently, the rumours sufficed for me to receive a phone call from one of the leaders in the west which was rather… strained. I thought it would be in everyone’s best interests for a face-to-face meeting to smooth things over. Before we spiral into the kind of distrust fostered in the war. Taki agreed and seemed quite willing to go.’

Klaus was surprised by the news.

‘Will he… be safe, Your Grace?’

‘Completely. He has Grand Chamblerlain Hasebe with him, as well as a small convoy of soldiers. The mission is strictly diplomatic, just like ours. Taki will be assuring the western leaders of our continued alliance and continued peace.’ Meiji raised his eyebrows a fraction. ‘And perhaps dropping a few pointed hints about how seriously the east is committed to ridding the world of nuclear weapons.’

Klaus could imagine Taki rising quite well to the task.

‘Your master wanted me to let you know where he would be,’ said the emperor.

‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’

‘He also wanted me to pass on his feelings of deepest regret over your continued separation and how greatly he looks forward to your reunion at the close of this final mission.’

Klaus stared. Meiji gave him his slow smile.

‘I gathered as much from his silences, at any rate.’

* * *

Smoke curled away into the air, creating new shapes as it rose. Its colour was sharp against the dark sky each time Klaus tilted his head back and exhaled.

He had decided he deserved a cigarette after a week of mind-numbing meetings in the Eurotean capital. The only point of excitement of the past few days had been when he overheard rumours on the streets that the civil unrest was gathering momentum and that the people seemed about ready to oust Rossi from leadership.

They feared, as Klaus told Meiji, that Rossi was gearing up to be the next Mussolin. Meiji had absorbed the information soberly and said that even if they were right, there wasn’t much the Eastern Country could do about it for now.

Nuclear threats and the second rise of fascism, Klaus thought as he lit up. Definitely called for a cigarette.

He was also almost disappointed. Given that this was quite possibly his final mission in a military capacity, a guilty part of him had craved something more. Just a taste of danger. Especially since Taki was safe and far away, he wouldn’t have minded a skirmish or two where he was. Something small, like a rebel protestor getting too close to the motorcade as they drove through the city. A chance to leap to the emperor’s protection. To show off just a little.

Those guilty thoughts were drowned in his first drag.

The cigarette bore his half-hearted qualms silently and he looked at it like it was an old friend. He always refrained as much as he could in front of Taki, who he always suspected had begrudgingly tolerated his smoking and drinking, but each time he did indulge, he remembered the comfort of the first drag and the strangely intimate glow of the embers.

He sat in the inner courtyard of Rossi’s mansion where the emperor had been invited to stay. He cast a glance at the tall, narrow windows lining the walls. He thought of the ostentatiousness within – the ten-foot chandeliers and rich parquet – and realised he preferred the eastern notion of royalty.

He also wondered about Rossi’s decision to move into Mussolin’s old mansion. For someone who was claiming to help guide his nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, there were a few things he said and did that set Klaus’ teeth on edge.

For one, he had tried to explain away the civil unrest in his country as something that was merely expected in the aftermath of dictatorship.

‘The road to democracy is a rocky one,’ he said with a regretful bristle of his thick grey whiskers.

Klaus couldn’t help but be suspicious. He stood beside Emperor Meiji, who perched in his full traditional regalia on an armchair in Rossi’s study. Rossi sat nearby. Klaus’ eye was drawn to the giant framed picture of the world that hung on the far side of the room.

After they discussed the nuclear situation (Rossi assuring the emperor that there wasn’t any word, yet, that Eurote was harbouring any nuclear technology), the topic turned to the relationship between Eurote and the east.

‘In any case, it comforts me a great deal to know that we have your support if Eurote is pulled into another war, Your Majesty,’ Rossi said.

‘Eurote wasn’t _pulled_ into the last war, Minister,’ Meiji returned. ‘Eurote started the last war. It was our alliance, our forced alliance I might add, that compelled my people to fight alongside yours.’

‘But the treaty we signed at the end of the first war –’

‘The old treaties are no longer valid under my reign, I’m afraid,’ Meiji said smoothly. ‘Your predecessor Chancellor Mussolin saw to that, after the elaborate assassination plot that took the lives of our last emperor and almost all of his kin.’

‘No one regrets the mistakes of the previous government more than I do,’ Rossi said uncomfortably.

‘While I am eager to forge new relations between our nations,’ Meiji went on, his eyes steady. ‘You should be aware that I will not draw my people into needless war again simply to honour old alliances. That policy ends with me.’

Klaus had flicked his gaze to the emperor, impressed and awed yet again.

A few days later, sitting alone on the bench that enclosed the single tree in the courtyard, Klaus found himself wondering idly about the qualities of leadership.

The sound of footsteps drew him from his meditations. He looked round to see someone approaching from the far side of the courtyard. At that time of night, Klaus assumed it was one of Rossi’s guards about to tell him off for skulking about. Then he noticed the man wasn’t wearing the guards’ uniform. A heavily hooded coat was pulled low over his eyes.

Klaus felt his pulse creep up just a little when he drew close.

‘Can I help you?’ he said sharply in Eurotean, squinting in the dark, wondering if he should reach for his gun. He wondered if one of the rebels had somehow made it onto the grounds.

And yet, there was something familiar about the stranger’s smooth, gliding gait.

‘I should hope so,’ he said.

He sat beside Klaus and removed his hood. The emperor’s narrow, strikingly slanted eyes took in Klaus’ look of astonishment.

‘I haven’t had a cigarette in sixteen years.’

* * *

Meiji’s face was thrown into sharp focus from the glow of the lighter that Klaus held for him. Klaus then watched as the emperor took a deep drag and exhaled luxuriously.

He wore the loose-fitting trousers that were customarily worn beneath a haori or kimono and a heavy grey coat with a fur-lined hood, now thrown back. His hair was gathered in a thick loop behind his head, out of which long tresses still fell into his hood and some over his shoulder.

Klaus didn’t know where to begin.

‘Where – where are your guards?’ he said, shocked enough to forget any honorifics.

‘I slipped out through an adjoining room. They think I’m sound asleep.’

Klaus didn’t know whether to laugh or remain speechless over his recklessness.

‘Please don’t look at me like that, Captain. It’s been a while since I've done anything this foolish. Though I have to admit, even at my age it gave me a familiar rush.’

He chuckled at himself.

Klaus felt a smile spread slowly across his face. He still couldn’t quite believe he was watching the emperor of the east casually and serenely enjoying one of his own cigarettes. He tried to remember the way Meiji had bowed his head beneath his heavy headdress as he spoke to Rossi earlier that day.

Taki suddenly came to mind.

‘Aren’t you –?’ He suddenly remembered his manners. ‘Your Majesty, doesn’t your code prohibit… this kind of thing? Smoking?’

‘It does indeed.’

Meiji took another long pull of the cigarette and didn’t elaborate. Klaus laughed.

‘It prohibits drinking too,’ Meiji added as smoke escaped his mouth in romantic curls. ‘But it would be welcome news if you had a flask of some sort on you. Simply for the purposes of rounding off a night of decadence.’

Klaus laughed again. ‘I don’t, Your Grace.’

Meiji smiled as though he hadn’t been entirely serious.

‘There are some vows I choose to ignore, on occasion,’ he explained at length. He then threw Klaus a sideways glance. ‘I’m sure there are things Taki chooses to ignore as well.’

Klaus felt a little heat rise to his face under Meiji’s gaze. He looked away.

‘But, as I said,’ Meiji continued. ‘It’s been a very long time since I let myself go astray.’

‘Sixteen years, was it?’

‘Indeed. I wore this very coat to escape the perimeter guards around our residence when I was seventeen. I was the black sheep of the family for quite a while.’

In that moment, Klaus found it quite easy to believe. He tried to picture a seventeen-year-old Meiji.

‘I caused no end of headaches for my long-suffering bodyguard, who insisted on coming with me wherever I went, even when I was up to no good.’

‘Natsume?’

‘No, someone before him. Someone whose nerves I rather enjoyed rattling, if I’m being perfectly honest.’ Even when Meiji settled further back on the bench, his posture remained perfect. ‘Taki reminds me of him, actually. They share those qualities of pure-heartedness and occasionally infuriating silence. Physically, though, he was twice my size. I believe he might have given you a run for your money in terms of sheer strength, Captain.’

Grinning widely, Klaus lit another cigarette for himself.

‘What happened to him?’ he suddenly wanted to know.

Meiji’s smile flickered.

‘He – they –’

Klaus glanced up, unused to hearing a stumble in that smooth, hypnotic voice. A subtle change had come over the emperor’s face.

‘He was discovered doing something unforgiveable,’ Meiji said slowly, watching the cigarette he held between his fingers. ‘Punishable by death, as it were.’

Klaus felt a small surge in his gut. Surely he didn't mean –

‘Even though he and I were equally guilty, as the only son and heir, my family couldn’t do anything to me. But he – he was condemned to death.’ A gust of wind picked up the long strands of hair lying on Meiji’s shoulder. ‘I begged for his life.’

In a few short seconds, the atmosphere had changed considerably. Klaus stared and waited.

‘So my family gave him a chance to regain his honour. They sent him away to fight in the war. A war you would barely remember, Captain. The one that changed No Man’s Land into what it is today.’

His eyes were in the distance. Somewhere in the past.

‘A year after he was sent out, he was killed.’ Silence fell briefly. ‘His was just one name among thousands. My family considered his honour regained and didn’t bat an eyelid. But I… I simply stopped. I stopped being rebellious. I stopped caring. I settled into my duties without complaint. When the time came, I accepted the title of shogun but avoided the limelight in almost every respect.’

Klaus recalled Taki having mentioned this tendency of his.

‘I suppose it all must have been a kind of… resignation.’

‘I’m sorry, Your Grace,’ Klaus said quietly into the silence. He tried to imagine the pain of losing Taki like that. Pain that stretched over two decades. He couldn’t.

‘There’s no honour in war,’ Meiji said, his voice low and steely. ‘No matter why it’s waged, or how. As long as I have the throne, there won’t be another one.’

Even dressed the way he was, with a cigarette in hand, his eyes and tone made Klaus believe him.

After a few moments, his familiar smile returned, carrying only a hint of sadness.

‘Forgive me, Captain. I haven’t spoken of him in sixteen years.’

‘It’s alright,’ Klaus replied, suddenly humbled that Meiji had chosen to confide in him. ‘Your Majesty.’

A patrol filed past the entryway into the courtyard. The moon cast a diffused glow behind thin clouds. Klaus, as ever, thought of Taki.

‘How is knighthood treating you these days?’ the emperor asked, his eyes on Klaus and his tone light.

Klaus wondered if he ought to confide in Meiji in his turn.

‘It’s good,’ he replied. ‘You know, for the most part.’

‘For the most part?’

Klaus chose his words carefully.

‘You put it well earlier. Something about pure-heartedness and… infuriating silences.’

‘Ah,’ said Meiji with a knowing curve of the lips.

There was a pause.

Klaus reflected on the changes to the political landscape at home. How a lot of Taki’s duties and responsibilities had now been siphoned to the emperor himself.

‘It could be a lot worse,’ he said. ‘Taki could have agreed to take your job, Your Grace, back when he had the chance. Then there would’ve been no hope of ever getting through to him.’ He ground his cigarette out beneath his foot with a smile and leaned back, hands deep in his pockets. ‘Then again, being emperor’s knight would have been kind of fun. Nice ring to it.’

Meiji chuckled.

‘Actually, Captain, there’s something I’ve been –’

At that moment, out of the serene stillness of the night, a series of deafening explosions shook the ground and shattered the windows of the mansion.

* * *

_A FEW MINUTES AGO, ELSEWHERE IN THE EUROTEAN CAPITAL_

Tachibana’s distrust of phone lines, even those that were claimed to be secure, had seen him sit on a train for several days just to put himself in Eurote.

He was almost entirely preoccupied with the results of the latest quorum, where almost all twelve leaders had voted to relinquish all of their powers to the emperor. He seethed in silence, his face giving nothing away.

Short-sighted fools.

He was ushered discreetly into a hotel suite in the capital where a tall, somewhat gaunt figure awaited him, his eyes on the city street outside the window. Minister Andrea Rossi turned when Tachibana entered.

They exchanged formalities and sat across from one another. Drinks were poured for them, even though neither of the stone-faced men had a drop.

‘I see what you mean about Meiji,’ Rossi said at length. ‘I had a proper sit-down with him earlier today. He’s such an idealist it’s almost nauseating.’

Rossi’s ruffled, harmless look had vanished. He was suddenly shrewd and calculating.

‘Even more so than the last one,’ Tachibana agreed.

They got down to business swiftly. Rossi outlined the state of nuclear research in his own nation.

‘It was clever to fully cooperate with the emperor,’ Tachibana observed. ‘Meiji suspects the west a great deal more than Eurote. You can keep up the work and the research without him breathing down your neck.’

‘Easier said than done,’ Rossi said, his face drawn. ‘The rebels in the city are gaining momentum. Do you know what we found on the latest interception? They’re calling me the next Mussolin. I can't be sure if they know or if they’re just blowing smoke. Either way, I’ve had to divert so much attention to holding them back, it’s been impossible to make any progress in the research.’

A small, unhappy pause followed.

‘What’s the situation in the east?’ Rossi finally asked.

Tachibana felt the indignation in a fresh wave.

‘You’ll hear about it soon. They’ve given the emperor absolute power over matters of governing and defence. There’s barely anything left over for me or the other shoguns.’

‘So your coup failed?’

Tachibana almost glared. It was unnecessary and vaguely humiliating for Rossi to have stated something so obvious. His comment seemed especially galling after everything he had done to help Rossi rise to power after Mussolin’s downfall.

‘It _failed_ when Reizen survived in No Man’s Land and came back to claim the throne,’ he said slowly. ‘It failed when I couldn’t convince him to allow my family to keep it and he instead passed it to that fool Meiji. It failed yet again when they found three of my warehouses.’

‘How far were you from using the weapons to stage the coup?’

‘Months, maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, nothing. I have one warehouse left they haven’t found. You need more than a warehouse of experimental-level nuclear technology, and virtually no man power to speak of, to gain the throne.’

‘No weapons, no man power,’ Rossi said slowly. ‘And now no autonomy.’

It appeared they had separately arrived at insurmountable road blocks in their respective nations. Tachibana was frustrated enough to vent; a practice that defied his nature and his upbringing.

‘If I were emperor, we’d be funding this research as our top priority. You’d have the weapons to turn your interim leadership into something more permanent. Eurote and the east would be the world’s rightful superpowers. If I were emperor –’

‘We can’t wait for you to become emperor,’ Rossi interjected. He then idly thumbed the rim of his teacup. ‘And I think I have an idea for what we can do in the meantime.’

Tachibana was somewhat surprised.

‘What?’

‘After having spent some time with Meiji, I think I can read him well enough. He’s an idealist, and idealists change their tune surprisingly quickly when they’re faced with a real-world threat. We could scare him.’

‘Scare him?’

‘He knows the west is building weapons too. What he doesn’t yet understand is how disadvantaged the east would be if it failed to keep up.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘A demonstration.’

Silence.

‘Think about it,’ said Rossi. ‘If he sees the damage this technology can do, he’ll realise he doesn’t stand a chance against the west in a future war. He’ll have to support its development.’

‘How can we stage a demonstration without being held responsible for –?’

‘Make it look like an accident.’

Tachibana’s mind raced. Rossi watched him for a few moments before continuing.

‘If you have Meiji on board, you can leave the development of the weapons to him. And when, in a few years, the technology is combat ready, you and General Nakamori can take him down. Stage the coup you were always planning. Then you’ll have the throne and the weapons.’

Tachibana thought about Nakamori. Who had worked as part of the same plot, the same team, that had once included Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde. He had been an invaluable asset in headquarters throughout the war. And he would prove to be even more valuable when Tachibana was finally ready to take the throne.

All that was needed was the weaponry. And Rossi was right. To develop the weaponry, they needed Meiji. For now.

‘What would scare him?’ Tachibana wondered aloud. He stood up and absently moved to the other side of the suite, his mind whirring.

Nakamori had provided him with inside information where he could. Where all the canisters were being sent to be disposed. He knew the last lot of them was being hauled out of the east by train the following day itself. He turned to Rossi suddenly, with the plan almost fully formed in his mind.

Before he could relay a word of it, however, one of Rossi’s attachés hurried into the room without even knocking.

And anxiously informed them of a rebel attack on Rossi’s mansion.

As a slightly stunned Rossi and Tachibana looked on, Rossi’s bodyguards filed through the door to secure the room and check windows; a black wave of efficiency. The Rossi mansion, they told him, was lost and Rossi himself was being moved to a safe location until the situation was under control.

Rossi told them to wait a moment.

He and Tachibana looked at one another meaningfully. If the emperor was killed that night itself, it would solve a great deal of both their problems. They wouldn’t even need to go ahead with their idea. Their bold, dangerous, irrevocable idea.

If the emperor died, the rebels, without even realising it, would be doing them a huge favour.

* * *

As more explosions went off in the building around them, Klaus pulled the emperor to the ground by the bench and crouched over him. In the back of his mind, he registered the look of shock on Meiji’s face and the way the cigarette flew out of his hand.

Ears ringing, Klaus took out his gun and cocked it.

‘Stay low,’ he yelled.

He craned his neck up, keeping his ears peeled for the sound of airplanes. The clear skies gave him a quick surge of relief. The bombs weren’t airborne. Which reduced the likelihood that they were nuclear.

Another one went off in a wing on the far side of the building. The courtyard itself, Klaus realised, had been spared so far. Only the mansion around them was going up in explosions of fire and rubble.

‘What’s happening?’ Meiji called from beneath him.

His voice, Klaus noticed, was still steady even when raised in fear.

Patrols were flying past the entrances, guns raised. Meaning, Klaus realised, the Eurotean rebels had probably breached and the explosions came from standard-issue grenades. Though the instinctive fear of an atomic explosion had ebbed, he knew they were still very much in danger.

Final mission, he thought almost wryly, even as his heart pounded. Why the fuck not.

He leaned into the emperor’s ear and pointed at one of the entrances to the courtyard that hadn’t collapsed.

‘That way!’ he said before pulling Meiji to his feet. ‘Stay low and stay –’

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone running at full speed towards them. Through a flare of white-hot anxiety, he pushed the emperor behind him and raised his gun.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Natsume called.

Klaus exhaled and lowered his gun. Natsume jogged to them. From his uncanny timing, Klaus deduced that he had followed the emperor discreetly since he left his chambers.

‘Your Majesty,’ Natsume panted. ‘Are you –?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Did you see who’s attacking?’ Klaus asked at once.

‘The rebels,’ Natsume confirmed. ‘I saw their armbands. I don’t know how many there are.’

‘Could they be targeting the emperor?’

‘I think they’re trying to destroy the building.’

More good news. If they were just caught in a crossfire, it increased their chances of escaping unharmed. Still, there was no saying what the rebels would do if they happened to come across the emperor of the east; friend and ally of the loathed Rossi.

Klaus kept Meiji’s head covered as they raced to the only remaining exit. Once there, Klaus paused. His mind raced ahead, taking in their surroundings, steeling himself against another explosion.

‘Captain,’ Meiji said tensely. ‘My guards. The ones outside my room…’

Klaus looked behind him at the south wing where the emperor’s bedroom was. Part of the building had buckled and flames licked at the broken windows.

‘Natsume,’ Klaus said decisively, turning to the man who was more than twice his age and technically outranked him. ‘Check the building. Gather everyone you can and get the car from the motorcade. Make sure you take the third one, it’s fully stocked. I’m taking the emperor to the north exit and we’ll wait for you beneath the bridge on the other side. Ram the gate or explode it if you need to.’

‘Right.’

Natsume headed off around the side of the building towards the south wing. After his footfalls receded, Klaus turned to Meiji.

‘It’s a little over five minutes on foot to the north exit. We’re crossing the trench beneath the bridge and waiting for Natsume on the other side.’

The emperor nodded once, tensely, in a way that strongly reminded Klaus of Taki.

‘Put your hood up and keep it up. They’re not after you, but I don’t want to take any chances.’

Meiji obeyed.

Klaus spared a few seconds to look him over. His eyes were still half-lidded and serene and his breathing steady. But the thin, taut line of his mouth gave him away. He was shaken. Klaus realised that, unlike both himself and Taki, this was Meiji’s first experience in a combat situation. He tried to recall his first taste of battle so many years ago. The cacophony of sounds and the panic and the tingling fear of death.

He tossed propriety to the winds and squeezed the emperor’s arm gently.

‘We’ll be fine,’ he said, his voice firm. ‘We’re getting out of this. Just do as I say, okay?’

‘Alright.’

‘Stay close.’

* * *

With Meiji behind him, Klaus ducked out of the cover of the entrance and they took off in the open square beyond. Only a small distance away, in the direction of the main gate, Rossi’s guards were caught in open fire against the rebels, several of whom had already made their way through.

They made it past the square without incident, pausing only once when another grenade sent the final entrance to the courtyard crumbling behind them and Klaus once again shielded Meiji’s body with his own and crouched close to the ground.

When they took off again, Klaus kept a tight grip on Meiji’s arm and was surprised to find he didn’t have to slow down much for the emperor to keep up.

The buildings lying between themselves and the north exit provided ample cover. Klaus paused for short seconds to allow Meiji to catch his breath as he peered around corners, gun at the ready.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’

Their only close call was a group of rebels who passed by within inches of where they were. Klaus ordered Meiji in an urgent whisper to flatten himself against the wall. He held his breath. They passed in a blur of civilian’s clothes bearing roughly hewn insignia on their arms, their rifles glinting in the moonlight.

Civilians, Klaus thought. With a bare minimum of military training. Disorganised, angry and running on adrenaline. For a strange moment, Klaus wondered whether he empathised with them. A people struggling to regain control in the aftermath of Mussolin. Doing what they thought was right.

He pushed abstract politics away, took Meiji’s arm and ran for the next cover.

They reached the northern perimeter of the grounds and skirted along the high wall, out of which the rebels had torn huge chunks. At the gate itself, the guards and the rebels were still engaging in open combat; the sharp patter of gunfire filled the air.

Hoping Natsume would be able to barrel his way through the main gate, Klaus helped Meiji over the rubble and through one of the gaps in the perimeter wall. On the other side of the grounds, still a safe distance from the gate, they carefully made their way down an incline and reached a shallow trench of water.

As they crossed the trench parallel to the bridge, the back of Klaus’ neck burned, expecting at any moment to be spotted by either the rebels or the guards. Feet splashing, the bottoms of their pants drenched, they reached the opposite shore safely. The sounds of shouting and gunfire on the bridge behind them didn’t relent.

Once they were finally crouching beneath the bridge on the far shore, Klaus allowed himself a moment’s respite. He estimated another few minutes before Natsume picked them up, if all went as planned. If the car didn’t make it out, then Klaus and Meiji would have to try to reach safety on foot.

He kept his ears peeled for the sound of a car. There was only more yelling and the crack of bullets. The warm air was weighed down by the distinct smell of gunpowder.

Meiji panted beside him from beneath his hood, an arm braced backwards on the grassy incline.

Klaus remembered his surprising swiftness across the grounds and felt a strange flicker of admiration. Despite knowing they ought to be on their guard, he was gripped by the sudden, irrational need to hear him laugh.

‘You know why this is happening, right?’ he said between breaths.

Meiji looked at him.

‘It’s because you smoked that cigarette.’

After a few seconds, Meiji’s lips lifted into a reluctant smile.

‘Your gods don’t fuck around,’ Klaus continued, hoping they were past the point of having to rein in language or blasphemy. ‘I mean, come on. The Son of Heaven lights up for the first time in sixteen years and revolution breaks out.’

Meiji lowered his chin and chuckled. Klaus was relieved to hear he sounded almost relaxed, if a little bemused.

‘Imagine, then,’ Meiji said, his voice carrying its usual sly inflection, ‘what might have befallen us if you did have that flask.’

Exhausted and wet, hunkering beneath a bridge only seconds away from gunfire, they suddenly found themselves struggling to muffle their laughter.

* * *

_MEANWHILE, ON A TRAIN HEADING OUT OF THE WEST_

It had been several hours since they left Klaus’ country behind and yet Taki could see it in his mind’s eye clearer than the vista before him.

He remembered standing at the edge of the field, staring at the short wooden gate and the shingles that Klaus himself had replaced only weeks earlier. Klaus’ singing voice came to him, strong and clear, between the dings of his hammer.

‘Taki-sama,’ Hasebe had said uncomfortably, waiting by the car. ‘We have to go. The train leaves soon.’

Taki had torn himself away, again feeling like a child.

On the train, he was lost to the world for several hours. Hasebe sat across from him and wondered if the young commander was feeling alright.

The news reached them only minutes after they reached Tachibana and Rossi.

‘A communique from Eurote,’ the conductor told him breathlessly. ‘There’s been an attack on Minister Rossi’s home. We think the emperor was caught in the crossfire.’

An intuitive dread filled Taki’s body.

* * *

Klaus’ final moments outside Rossi’s mansion came down to a matter of seconds.

It felt as though he and Meiji had waited beneath the bridge for hours. Time dragged on painfully slowly and Klaus felt his nerves wearing thin.

And then when he heard the screech of tires and the unmistakeable sound of a gate being rammed open, he and Meiji got to their feet and moved out of the cover of the bridge.

Not one but two black cars skidded to a halt on their side of the bridge, bearing fresh gunshot marks. Behind them, the guards and rebels appeared unclear as to whose side they were on and whether it was worth pursuing them.

The back door of the first car sprang open. Klaus spied Natsume in the driver’s seat as well as four of the Imperial Guard.

The second car seemed to be carrying the rest of their delegation from the east, guards and attendants all.

No casualties, Klaus thought with relief.

He ushered Meiji to the first car, where there was only room for one. He breathed another sigh of relief when the emperor was moved to the safety of the middle of the seat between two of his guards.

‘Klaus!’ Meiji suddenly called as the door was about to close.

Noting that it was the first time the emperor had called him by his name, Klaus hurried to assure him that he would be close behind.

The car took off into the darkness and Klaus sprinted towards the second car.

It came down to a matter of seconds. When the situation was combed through in the coming days, it was hard to tell whether the final grenade was thrown by Rossi’s guards in an attempt to destroy the bridge and prevent further rebels from using the north exit, or whether the grenade came from the rebels themselves.

Either way, the part of the bridge that had provided Klaus and Meiji with cover only moments ago was uprooted in a fiery mess of bricks and light. Shrapnel flew out in all directions, lightning fast and deadly. Klaus, who hadn’t reached the second car, lifted his arms to shield against it and twisted his body away.

Seconds too late.

The blast knocked him off his feet. A sharp pain in his chest and a particularly brutal slice of pain across his face were the last things he felt before his head snapped back against the ground and all was lost to darkness.

* * *

‘He’s alive.’

Tachibana heard Rossi’s voice over the phone and dismissed the bell hop with a nod. So much for his efforts to avoid interception.

‘Meiji?’

‘Yes. I just received word that his men arrived at a hospital in Eurote. One of them is in critical condition. But Meiji’s unharmed.’

A small silence. Tense and almost regretful.

‘Then we’re going ahead with the plan,’ Tachibana confirmed. ‘The train carrying the last of the cargo pulls out of the east tomorrow. General Nakamori will take care of it.’

Rossi seemed to hesitate.

‘There’s no guaranteeing that Meiji will change his mind about anything, even if we do this,’ he said.

Despite the fact that it had been Rossi’s idea in the first place, Tachibana heard his sudden nervousness. It was well-placed, after all.

There was a feeling in the air, one which carried on the line between them, that a plan like theirs, thrown together at the last minute and playing with such hefty pieces, could have grave, unforeseen consequences.

On the other hand, it could be the catalyst that changed the world in their favour. In Tachibana’s favour.

Besides that, after years of working in the shadows, a part of him longed to know what his toys were capable of. He longed to see, and for others to see, what true, raw power looked like.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Tachibana. ‘It’s time to show the world the future. If we miss this train, we’ve missed our chance.’

After he hung up, he took a moment to stare at his hand on the phone. It was a strange moment; one that hung in the air as though frozen.

Snapping out of it soon enough, he told his attendant to get General Nakamori on the phone.

* * *

_THE FOLLOWING DAY, ON THE EAST-WEST RAIL LINE, JUST OUTSIDE THE BORDER TO THE EASTERN COUNTRY_

And so, after months of unsteady peace, the fates aligned for three things to happen simultaneously.

A day after Klaus’ body was pulled to safety, a team of Eurotean doctors had removed the shrapnel from his chest and he lay in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

At the same time, a cargo train pulled out of the east carrying the last of Tachibana’s canisters, ready to be disposed of in a remote location. On board the cargo train was a small explosive device with a timer, whose placement General Nakamori had personally overseen. He had followed Tachibana’s instructions just as he had done during the war, hoping the man knew what he was doing.

At the same time, Taki was on a train bound for the east.

It had been a full day since word had reached him about the attack on Rossi’s residence. He had gathered that Rossi himself hadn’t been home. There was also scattered intelligence that Emperor Meiji was alive and well. Taki felt his head spin each time he demanded details about Meiji’s men. They had no information so far.

If they had been close to any metropolitan area, Taki would have ordered the train to stop so he could gather information from a more stable location. At that point, all he could do was hope some news about Klaus would be relayed soon.

He cast a frustrated glance out the window, the latest useless telegram scrunched in his hand. The wheat fields and water tank in the distance were familiar. They were in Roskilde, a region in a western nation bordering Klaus’ homeland. It was where he and Klaus had taken walks during the train’s scheduled stop, several times, on their way to and from the west. The sight did nothing to unfurl the knot of worry in his chest.

He also thought he spied the glint of a train far in the distance, heading towards them.

It was midday and the sun threw everything into sharp focus. Taki’s thoughts were far away.

At first, it was nothing more than a flash of light.

* * *

The train and the farmlands beyond were filled with a brash light that reminded Taki of the magnesium light used in photography.

It had the immediate effect of silencing everyone in the carriage, including Hasebe and the telegram operators.

Taki blinked and moved closer to the window. He saw only more of that strange light glazing the wheat fields and drowning out the glint of the distant water tank and even the far-off mountains.

He suddenly remembered the golden eyes of the wolf and the fire that consumed the world.

After an interval of perhaps half a second, there came an ungodly sound. The windows of the train blew inwards.


	34. Unbind Him

Klaus knew with an unmovable certainty that the explosion had killed Taki.

It was a type of conviction he hadn’t even experienced all those months ago during his exile when the radio told him that Taki and every other Reizen leader had been assassinated. This time, he knew. He knew it as soon as he overheard the doctors talking about the young Eastern commander who had been there, just outside his country, where the nuclear blast had taken place.

That conviction took hold and made him pull the IV drips and intubations out of himself and drag his way from the hospital room. It made him resist the orderlies, three or four of them, who tried to haul him back into bed. It even made him ignore the doctors who – after being informed of why there was a giant of a man roaring down the hallways like a wounded animal – tried to tell him that Taki had survived. That there wasn’t a scratch on him, in fact.

He didn’t believe them. He thought they were trying to placate him.

Nothing would placate him. He would break through the walls of the hospital itself if it meant he could be closer to where Taki was. Where he had been. So he could find those who had taken Taki from him and tear them limb from limb, slowly.

Barefoot, wild-eyed, weighed down by sedatives, in enormous pain and bleeding out from his various wounds, it still took the effort of six people to stop him. One of the orderlies crouched nearby on the floor, having suffered a rogue elbow to the nose. Nurses were too afraid to approach. Three more orderlies tried to hold him back by his arms. Two of the braver doctors tried to help.

They eventually tackled him to the ground, where he lay rigid and moaned a single name.

And then finally, one of the more astute doctors managed to make a few calls. Ten minutes later, after giving him several more precautionary shots, they helped Klaus back to his feet. They slowly pulled him to a nearby phone where someone handed him the receiver.

He numbly put it to his ear.

_‘Klaus?’_

If Klaus had had the energy, or if there had been less medication in his system, simply hearing Taki’s voice would have been enough to make him cry. He instead let out a small groan.

‘Taki…’ he mumbled.

For Taki, however, hearing the broken way Klaus said his name was enough for tears to cloud his eyes. 

After the chaos of Roskilde, it had taken hours for him to gather the details of the emperor’s near escape from Rossi’s home in Eurote. Taki had discovered that, thanks to Klaus, everyone in the emperor's delegation had survived. Klaus himself, however, along with a few of the emperor's guards, had been injured and taken to a Eurotean hospital.

He was about to ask which hospital when there was an uncannily timed call from a Eurotean doctor asking to speak to Commander Taki Reizen. In the few seconds he was on the phone with the doctor, Taki learned of how much chaos Klaus had caused in the halls of the hospital. He also learned the seriousness of his injuries.

None of which mattered to Klaus.

‘Taki,’ he said again, praying for the heavy anchors of morphine to let him be so he could focus. ‘I thought… I thought you –’

‘I’m fine. I saw it but it – it didn’t reach our train. I promise I’m okay.’

‘You’re okay. You’re okay.’

Klaus sagged against the wall, eyes closed, knuckles white on the phone. The surrounding orderlies breathed a sigh of relief.

‘I’m okay,’ Taki repeated, his voice breaking, tears silently spilling over Klaus’ pain; the weakness and desperation in Klaus’ voice. ‘I’m okay, so –’

‘I want to come to you,’ Klaus said, nearly delirious with relief. He was suddenly convinced that his luck would be short-lived. That Taki was still in danger. ‘I’m going to come to you. I’m –’

‘No!’ Taki said at once, angrily wiping the tears from his face. ‘No, Klaus listen to me! I’m fine. But you’re not. You’re going to let the doctors there take care of you. Do you understand?’

‘Taki –’

‘That’s an order, Klaus,’ Taki said, his voice still shaking slightly but carrying his familiar authority. ‘You’re going to get back in bed and let them help you. And I’m coming to you. Okay? I’ll find you.’

Eyes still closed, Klaus frowned, trying to process the order.

‘Klaus? Are you there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait for me, okay? I’m coming.’

Klaus swallowed. His throat was so parched that it hurt him to do so. He realised absently that he was weak enough to be in danger of sliding to the floor.

‘Okay,’ he said finally, his voice sounding like it had fallen flat.

Taki’s sigh of relief came through in a crackle. He gripped the phone, suddenly unwilling to hang up.

‘I’ll be there soon,’ he repeated.

‘Okay,’ Klaus breathed, eyes barely open.

Still numb, he allowed a nurse to hang up the phone for him. He was then gingerly guided back to his room where he fell onto the bed and passed out for almost a full day.

* * *

It was Hasebe’s quick thinking that had pulled Taki to the floor of the train carriage when all the windows blew in.

They then felt a wave of heat ripple over them for several seconds, like the fumes of a gas fire.

It passed just as quickly as it arrived. When Hasebe and Taki straightened again, they heard only raised voices and the tinkle of glass falling to the floor throughout the train, which had come to a very sudden stop.

Taki’s first priority was ensuring everyone on board the train was safe, beginning with his men. Afterwards, he led his small group of soldiers outside to try to understand what had happened. From brief visual inspections, it appeared that, aside from the windows having been blown in, the train itself was unharmed.

The land, however, was unrecognisable.

The entire stretch of farmland and forestland, areas where treetops and wheat fields had once stretched almost to the mountains, was now razed to the ground, burnt to cinders and aflame in several places. Taki’s throat closed in shock and anger. He remembered how he and Klaus had taken their first walk through that field the day before he made Klaus his knight.

He ordered a few of his men to return to the train and find something to help put out the fires.

As they moved closer to the centre of the blast, still several kilometres away in the middle of Roskilde, they spied farmhouses ablaze or sitting in smoking heaps.

An incendiary bomb, Taki thought in vain. With an exceptionally strong explosive action. Who or why he couldn’t be sure, but –

But he knew it wasn’t an incendiary bomb, or any other kind of weapon that they had known before. The world around them had been plunged into an eerie hush, as though the very air had fled. The burnt land itself seemed stunned in the aftermath of something history hadn't yet seen.

Taki suddenly spied something moving near one of the farmhouses. A group of people staggering into the open, bleeding and stumbling. Taki yelled for his men and they rushed over to help.

They spent several hours in the bomb blast radius helping survivors and trying to put out fires. Taki oversaw the movement of survivors, whose burns and wounds were nothing short of horrific, towards the train where the on-board medical supplies were exhausted in no time. Despite everything he had seen in the war, he struggled to stomach the sight of a mother carrying her burnt, semi-conscious child into the safety of the train. The child had sandy hair.

His men came back with reports about the possible site of the blast. They confirmed that the railway line between east and west had been destroyed. And that there was nothing at the epicentre but scorched earth.

* * *

Dark hair swam to Klaus from across the haze of pain. From out of the thick fog of unconsciousness. Dark hair and pale skin.

‘Taki…’

He opened his eyes wider and the haze filtered away into the corners, slowly, as though it was being tilted and poured away.

‘Not quite, I’m afraid,’ said a low, musical voice.

Meiji’s face materialised before him. The emperor wore a look of both relief and concern, all while managing to retain his composure.

‘Meiji-sama.’

Klaus heard his own voice. It was absurdly deep; cracked and gravelly.

He was in an unfamiliar, sun-filled room which contained only his bed and the various IV drips, catheters and monitors to which he was attached. Pain thrummed in his head, his chest and on the left side of his face. He tried to sit up.

‘It’s best if you don’t move for a while,’ Meiji said with a hand on his arm.

‘Where’s Taki? Is he okay?’

‘He’s fine. He was held back in a hospital near where the explosion took place, just so they could run some tests. He’s on his way and should be here within a day.’

Klaus closed his eyes for a moment. He discovered that sounds made tiny, painful lights pop in his skull. But the emperor’s words were a relief.

‘Where am I?’

The order in which Klaus had asked his questions brought a smile to Meiji’s lips.

‘You’re back in the east. In the palace. This is the Royal Hospital on palace grounds. You’ve been cared for by my own physicians, the best in the country.’

‘But… Eurote…’ Klaus managed thickly.

‘You were stabilised in a hospital in Eurote. Then you were flown here. You’ve been here for a little over a day.’

‘Natsume? And everyone else?’

‘All fine,’ Meiji assured him. ‘Largely thanks to you, I might add. The two guards stationed outside my room suffered a few minor burns but they're fine too.’

His hair was pulled back in a familiar loop. He wore a patterned kimono that was a step up from his fur-lined hood but still more casual than anything Klaus had seen him wear.

‘How are you feeling?’ the emperor asked him.

Klaus still had a lot of questions. About Taki, about the emperor, about Eurote, about the nuclear explosion that he had heard about in snippets. It felt especially surreal to be lying there of wounds sustained in a battle that had nothing to do with the east while Taki had been so close to something that had been far worse in almost every way.

But the sheer volume of questions made it difficult for him to know where to begin. So he let out a small grunt and settled back against the pillow.

‘Like someone… opened my head… and filled it with glue.’

‘Shall I fetch the doctor?’

‘I was just… being poetic,’ Klaus said in a breathy drawl. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Awake, are we?’ said a high, cheerful voice. A plump, pretty nurse entered, wearing a white cap and dress.

She took a moment to bow before the emperor but her manner around him was casual enough that she seemed used to his presence in the room. Klaus wondered how long Meiji had waited by his bedside.

The nurse then leaned over Klaus to peer at him kindly.

‘Oh my,’ she said with a broad smile.

Klaus raised his eyebrows at her questioningly, the sedatives weighing down his eyelids.

‘The nurses have been betting on what colour your eyes are,’ she explained, without a trace of self-consciousness. ‘Blue was the favourite to win. I don’t think anyone guessed gold.’

As she bustled about, straightening his bedclothes and checking the monitors, Klaus tried a smile.

And he was startled by how much it hurt. Sharp, slicing pain that filled the left side of his face. He winced and lifted a hand to his cheek and felt the rough surface of some kind of leather strap.

‘What’s this?’

A strange look flickered over the nurse’s face.

‘Try not to touch it,’ she said softly. ‘If it’s causing you any pain, let me know, we can increase the morphine dosage –’

Klaus felt his stomach flip when he ran his finger along the rough surface which stretched from the corner of his mouth almost all the way to his left eye. He remembered, vaguely, trying to protect his face and body from the flying shrapnel.

Not a leather strap, he realised, his heart sinking fast.

‘I... I want to see it,’ he said.

He was just lucid enough to see how the nurse exchanged a nervous glance with Meiji, who nodded. A few moments later, she came back with a hand mirror.

‘Now, you have to know,’ she began in gentle tones as Klaus took it and tilted it up, ‘it’s not always going to look like that. Once the stitches come out –’

At first, Klaus was too weak to lend his voice to the shock he felt. A long, deep diagonal slash ran up the entire length of his cheek, red and inflamed, held together with stitches in a way that reminded him of a railway track. It was overwhelming.

‘My God,’ he mumbled.

‘Once the stitches come out,’ the nurse tried again, ‘and the cut has time to heal properly, it’s going to look worlds better, you’ll see. It’ll just leave a raised, sort of, glossy scar. Like the one on your arm!’

Her words barely registered. Klaus continued to stare at his disfigured face. A short puff of a laugh escaped him.

‘Now I really do look like a Mad Dog.’

He imagined the look on Taki’s face when he saw him. And then, to his shock and humiliation, he felt tears spring to his eyes. He handed the mirror back to the nurse and turned away, only just managing to hold them back.

But Meiji had noticed.

‘Scars are very becoming on men,’ he said in a tone that was both light and sincere. He turned to the nurse. ‘Aren’t they?’

‘Oh, absolutely, Your Majesty!’ the nurse intoned, her eyes twinkling when she looked back at Klaus. ‘Girls love a good war scar. You’ll be irresistible.’

Klaus smiled weakly at their efforts and tried to ignore how his cheek flared in pain when he did so.

* * *

After they had done what they could for the survivors in Roskilde, Taki began to realise they needed to evacuate the area as soon as possible. A few of his men had already started displaying signs of radiation sickness. 

But with the train line destroyed and their communication lines down, he couldn’t think how they might even begin the evacuation. Just as he put together a patrol to scout nearby farmhouses for any working vehicles, a steady drone grew louder in the distance.

Everyone on and around the train tensed, wondering if they hadn't yet seen the end of hell. Taki jumped from the train carriage and stared into the sky where clouds had begun gathering.

Planes zoomed in low over the mountains. Dozens. One of his men, who peered through binoculars, reported with relief that they bore the markings of the east. Shortly afterwards, an entire platoon of jeeps rolled towards them from the direction of the mountains, small as ants but bearing down fast.

Meiji, Taki deduced with a wave of gratitude. Meiji had sent the cavalry.

All three hundred and twelve survivors, including the residents of Roskilde, were taken to a nearby hospital where Taki had grit his teeth in frustration and impatience as, over the course of an entire day, every conceivable test was run to check him for radiation sickness.

The following day, when the doctors cautiously gave him and his men the all clear, Taki immediately got in a car bound for the eastern capital where, according to the latest reports, Klaus had been taken.

As they drove, Taki played his short, heart-wrenching conversation with Klaus over and over in his mind. He also pored over the details of what had happened in Eurote, as relayed over the phone by one of Meiji's imperial guards.

After escaping the grounds themselves, Captain Wolfstadt had secured the emperor in the first car before turning to enter the second. A grenade explosion had taken out the nearby bridge and the captain caught the shrapnel in his face and chest and suffered a minor concussion when his head hit the ground. The imperial guards from the second car had hauled him into the backseat and taken off.

The report had been cold and clinical and didn’t stop Taki's heart from hammering like a small caged beast as he strode briskly through the corridors of the Royal Hospital.

One of the doctors led him around the corner and opened the door to a large private room that was flanked by two imperial guards. Before Taki entered, he felt his heart lift for the first time in days when he heard Klaus’ laughter from within.

* * *

He saw Klaus first and the emperor second. Klaus turned his head where he was lying in bed and smiled. The emperor stood near him, in his full imperial raiment including an ornate headdress silhouetted by the glare from the window.

In the back of his mind, Taki knew he ought to bow and pay his respects. But his relief at seeing Klaus, the sudden reality of both of their close scrapes with death, blotted out his sense of propriety. He went straight to Klaus’ side and took his hand.

Both were reminded of the time Klaus had done the same by Taki’s bedside in Suguri’s office after their nightmare in No Man’s Land.

‘Are you okay?’ Taki asked.

‘I’m fine,’ said Klaus, his eyes calm but somewhat unfocused. Taki suspected either sedatives or morphine. ‘Better now for seeing your face.’

Klaus still vividly remembered his conviction that Taki had died. He struggled even now to understand why he had felt it so strongly. He wanted to take Taki’s face in his hands just to feel the warmth of his skin and assure himself he was there.

Taki, meanwhile, was relieved that Klaus seemed alright, aside from his slightly slurred speech and heavy eyelids. He had expected heavy, padded bandages but Klaus' hospital robe seemed to lay relatively flat on his chest. As the doctor explained when he came in, the Eurotean surgeons had removed all the shrapnel from his chest that had posed a threat.

But Taki’s eyes grew wide when he saw the monstrous stitched-up cut on Klaus’ face. He reached out to touch it and curled his fingers away at the last moment, afraid it might hurt.

Klaus felt his heart beating louder than it ought to.

‘Come on, now,’ he said with a nervous grin. ‘It doesn’t look that bad, right? Meiji-sama says scars look good on men.’

Taki, who couldn’t care less what Klaus looked like, barely heard what he had said.

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Nah. Only hurts when I smile or laugh.’

‘The doctors have advised him to refrain from doing either for a few days,’ Meiji said.

‘So I’m fucked,’ Klaus concluded with a grin that must have hurt.

Taki cast a shocked glance between him and the emperor, on the point of apologising for Klaus’ crass language. But Meiji’s face was unchanged and he watched Klaus almost fondly with warm, half-lidded eyes.

Another swell of jealousy. Trying not to remember how Klaus’ face was lit up with laughter just before Taki came in, he battened down his irrationality and finally turned to face the emperor. He only then noticed two attendants who stood by the wall in silence and somewhat uneasily, unused to having to cater to the Imperial Ruler of the east in a hospital room.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said with a low bow.

‘Don’t concern yourself with etiquette just now, Taki. It’s enough to see that you’re safe.’

‘I’m fine,’ Taki said as he straightened, again feeling the frustration of his wasted day in hospital. ‘Everyone on our train was okay. It was everyone else –’

But the images of the burned and staggering residents of Roskilde was something Taki hadn’t yet come to terms with. He tried to focus on Klaus.

Klaus. Who lay before him smiling but battered. Having brushed with death yet again.

 _If there was ever a person whom the gods would personally salvage from the direst of situations,_ Hans had said in his slow, measured way. _It would be Captain Wolfstadt._

The doctor then stepped in to check the state of the cut. He covered it in a thin strip of gauze and shined a light into Klaus’ eyes. The room seemed to be infused with sunlight. Though the window, there came the sound of something gently splashing into water. Taki imagined the peace of the pond and its various inhabitants and struggled to reconcile it with all that had happened.

_Will you release me into the field, my Master?_

Three times now. Three times when he had sent Klaus away only to have him come back in pieces. Each time Taki’s heart had been rent. And yet, he had sent him again. Such was the life they had chosen.

He wanted, suddenly, to apologise. For every single wound that Klaus had suffered under his command. For the times they had been separated and the times he had put Klaus’ life on the line. The words, emotionally charged and irrational, were there on the tip of his tongue.

But Meiji’s presence made it impossible. Somewhere in his web of irrational feelings, Taki felt a small stab of resentment. He suddenly wished the emperor would leave.

The doctor gave Klaus a cold compress to hold against the gauze over his cut for the next minute or so to help with the swelling. He then bowed to the emperor and left the room. The door closed gently behind him.

Klaus reached for Taki’s hand again, which Taki took, this time with a self-conscious glance at Meiji.

‘Some final mission for us both, huh?’ he said with a smirk that half disappeared beneath the compress. He shifted his fingers uncomfortably over its cold surface. ‘Diplomatic, I think they were called.’

Meiji smiled thinly and reached for the washcloth a nurse had left on the side table.

‘I feel partly responsible for that,’ he said. He then gently lifted Klaus’ hand and began to cover the compress with the softer surface of the washcloth.

Taki and the attendants alike were startled. One of the latter hurried forwards to stop the emperor from getting his hands dirty. But Taki was closer. He reached over Klaus’ body.

‘Let me, Your Grace.’

More than the emperor’s actions themselves, Taki realised he was bristled by the familiarity with which they were carried out. He hoped his cheeks weren’t flushed.

Klaus’ eyebrows lifted slightly, hearing the unfamiliar tone.

‘It’s no trouble,’ the emperor began.

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Taki said. ‘Your Majesty,’ he added.

Though he was worried the moment would prove itself unnecessarily strained, Meiji graciously stepped away and folded his hands back into his long sleeves. When Klaus took hold of the compress again and Taki stood over him, the emperor stepped almost ruminatively towards the window.

One of his attendants quietly reminded him that the meeting with the press was due to start soon and all of his counsel and ministers had already gathered.

‘Roskilde,’ the emperor said in a different tone that drew Taki’s gaze.

Meiji stared out across the pond, his mind once again lingering on the horrific reports that had come from that area. Things that Taki had seen.

 _Let’s_ _hope_ , he thought,  _it will be enough of a warning._

He met Taki’s eyes. ‘I hope to speak to you soon, Taki, about what you saw. When you’re ready.’

Taki hesitated. He knew he ought to speak with the emperor immediately. But he could feel the warmth of Klaus' body through the hand he had kept on his arm. And in his dream, the dream with the wolf, the flames had engulfed them both. He couldn’t shake his uneasiness; the sense that they had escaped too easily. And so he was deeply reluctant to leave Klaus even for a moment.

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

Meiji took a few steps towards the door and the relieved attendants made to follow. They stopped when the emperor stopped. His face set, eyes on the floor, the emperor seemed to be deliberating over something. He slowly turned his serene gaze back to Klaus and Taki.

‘I originally intended to speak to you about this much later,’ he said, his tone suddenly low and serious. ‘But, the situation being what it is, perhaps there’s no sense in delay.’

He moved a little closer again, appearing to be lost in thought. Taki waited. Klaus tried to focus through the drugs still whirling in his system.

Meiji then lifted his chin slightly, as though he had decided.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Taki. There’s something that I have been contemplating for some time. I have a proposition that I need you both to hear.’

Although he could have been referring to anything, his words immediately summoned Hans. Hans and his request to be Taki's second knight. Both Taki and Klaus tensed.

‘And I hope that my framing this as a request rather than… anything else… will adequately convey how much respect I carry for you, Taki.’

Taki's pulse picked up, even though it had no reason to.

‘Captain Wolfstadt,’ Meiji began, ‘has proved himself invaluable. Time and again. First in his infiltration of the warehouse during which there were no casualties to speak of. And in his execution of covert missions in the west. And above all, during recent hostilities in Eurote. He’s inimitable. One of a kind.’

Klaus wondered why such high words of praise should inspire a small ripple of foreboding.

Meiji's tone when he next spoke was still quiet but suddenly resolute.

‘I would like for Captain Wolfstadt to join the emperor's guard,’ he said. ‘As the head of the emperor's guard, to be more precise. A post which, as I once mentioned, I haven’t yet filled. I anticipate that both Natsume and my counsel alike will be relieved to hear there is finally a candidate I'm not half-hearted about.’ He paused. ‘Captain Wolfstadt would, in effect, be the emperor's knight. My knight.’

He took in their shocked faces before smoothly continuing.

‘As emperor's knight, the captain would be given a great deal more than his current position affords him. He would have title and privilege. Even his own property.’

Taki's breathing was just a touch more forced.

‘Taki. As his current master, I'm putting my request to you. You may take all the time you need to consider –’

‘No.’

* * *

The lack of honorifics shocked everyone almost as much as the fact that Taki had interrupted the emperor mid-sentence.

Somewhere outside, a long-legged bird stepped delicately through the shallows of the pond, scouting for fish, remembering the morsels that had been fed to it only days ago. Its gentle sounds were heard throughout the still and silent palace grounds; grounds that didn’t know of the carnage in Roskilde nor the chaos in Eurote.

Its gentle sounds also seemed to fill the awful silence in the hospital room.

The attendants wore looks of shock that rivalled Klaus’.

Meiji’s eyes flashed for the first time that Klaus had ever seen.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No,’ Taki repeated, curling his hands into fists as though it might better help him control his sudden disproportionate sense of anger and jealousy. He tried to form words. ‘He's –’

_He's mine._

‘Klaus is... already bound to me.’

‘Unbind him,’ Meiji said simply.

Klaus wondered if he was suffering a morphine hallucination. He removed the compress and tried to sit up, glancing uncertainly between the masters of the east.

‘I heard you did so once before,’ the emperor continued, with a sliver of shrewdness in his tone. ‘So it stands to reason you could do it again.’

The words reached a wound that hadn’t entirely healed over. Taki grit his teeth.

‘No,’ he said yet again.

Meiji saw the look in his eye and suddenly understood how it was possible that the young prince had won a war for his country.

‘I said earlier that I would frame it as a request out of respect,’ Meiji said coolly. ‘But you know as well as I do that I can order you to do so.’

 _On pain of death,_ he didn't have to say. Taki knew it was true. His decision to turn the throne over to Meiji – persuading him to do so, no less – suddenly came back at him in full force.

A different type of silence fell in the room. It was astounding how quickly both Roskilde and Eurote had receded into the background.

‘So,’ the emperor said, ‘If need be, I’ll order you to release Klaus of his duty to you and turn him over.’

‘I won't. I won’t give him up. Not even –’ Taki stared and struggled for words. ‘Not even if you order it. I _won't_ give him up.’

Klaus' heart raced.

The attendants glanced at one another in agitation. The way Taki had defied the emperor, his tone and his vaguely threatening stance, was more than enough reason for them to summon the guards stationed outside the door and have him arrested.

Klaus, who was trying in vain to catch Taki's eye, had a great many things he wanted to say but his mind was still an unsteady mix of sedatives and shock. He was aware most strongly of how much the exchange had upset Taki. Enough for him to put himself and his honour on the line before the emperor.

And then it came to Klaus – the distinct, remote and fantastical possibility that his master was jealous.

As though searching for a clue, Klaus glanced again from Taki to Meiji, who hadn't smiled once and whose narrow, lidded eyes were suddenly cold. 

‘I'm aware that the law reduced Klaus to your property when he became your knight,’ Meiji said. ‘But I didn’t think you would be so willing to make such a significant decision without even consulting him first.’

Taki had no reply to that. His look, when it finally landed on Klaus, was so heavy that Klaus felt his pulse surge again.

‘Klaus,’ Meiji said, his tone a fraction gentler. ‘You yourself said being emperor's knight was something you wanted. And if things are proving...’ He seemed to choose his words with care. ‘... _difficult_ with your current situation...’

The hurt that flashed across Taki's face felt to Klaus like a kick in the stomach. He turned once more to the emperor, trying to muster a glare, feeling suddenly as though he had betrayed Taki in a courtyard miles from there. He wondered if it was possible that he had completely misjudged Meiji from the very beginning.

‘What do you say, Captain?’ Meiji finished.

At that moment, something ephemeral passed between Klaus and the emperor. A moment that recalled their slightly dazed laughter as they hunkered beneath a bridge in Eurote. There was a flicker of meaning in Meiji’s eyes that almost tried to counter Klaus' disbelieving glare. Klaus blinked in confusion, trying to understand it.

The situation in which he now found himself had been so unexpected that Klaus couldn’t at all be sure whether he imagined it or not. So he remained on his guard as much as he could.

‘I've always liked you, Meiji-sama,’ he said.

The emperor smiled for the first time. Taki turned to the floor, heart pounding, hands still in fists.

‘But, really, your headdress must be on too tight if you think I'd ever leave Taki.’

One of the attendants emitted a faint gasp over the casual insult. Meiji's smile, however, remained. By then, Klaus was even more convinced that he had correctly read the look that Meiji had sent him.

The emperor’s words, on the other hand, maintained his divisive campaign.

‘Is there anything at all that might compel you to change your mind?’

‘Not while Taki and I are both alive.’

‘Not to put too fine a point it, but if I do order it, your master would have to turn you over on pain of death –’(Klaus looked at Taki in mild shock) ‘– and leave you with no choice but to serve as the head of my Imperial Guard.’

‘Then I'd spend the whole time trying to fight my way back to Taki.’ He smiled benignly at Meiji. ‘Hope that’s a quality you’re looking for in your knight.’

‘Loyalty is an admirable trait, Captain, but I urge you to consider the situation in more depth.’

‘No, thanks.’ 

‘You're truly willing to dismiss privilege and title and honour in favour of being property?’

‘Yep,’ Klaus said easily.

During the impasse that followed, Klaus realised with a sort of detached bemusement that, for once, he seemed to be the one in control of his emotions while Taki struggled to get a handle on his. Though Taki hadn’t moved a muscle since Meiji began speaking to Klaus, it was only too easy to see the tension in his still form.

Meiji made a slight sound that could have been a sigh.

‘I thought as much,’ he said. ‘Yours is a bond that the world ought to envy.’

Again, something in the way he spoke brought Hans to mind.

But Klaus also suddenly remembered the story of another bond that went beyond master and servant. The bodyguard who had been torn from his young master all those years ago. The pain Meiji had silently carried with him for decades.

‘To be quite honest,’ Meiji continued, and Klaus was relieved to hear that familiar, almost playful cadence in his voice. ‘I knew it was a lost cause as soon as I heard Taki forget his honorifics.’

Taki looked up warily.

‘I – I apologise, Your Grace.’

Despite the words themselves, Taki’s voice was still stiff. Almost insincere. It was obvious enough that all three heard it. Klaus felt another rush of love.

‘Your Majesty,’ an extremely nervous attendant piped up. ‘The meeting –’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Meiji dipped his chin very slightly in Klaus’ direction. ‘I wish you a speedy recovery, Captain.’

Meiji cast the pair one final inscrutable look before sweeping from the room, his attendants in tow. Outside, they heard the sound of the imperial guards falling in step and leading the way.

Klaus and Taki were left alone in a ringing silence.

Taki was caught, yet again, in a tangle of emotions. He tried to find relief. Gratitude over Klaus’ words. Instead he felt foolish. Prickly, pointed embarrassment. He remained still and avoided Klaus’ eye, though he could feel Klaus' gaze on his face. He was aware that his hands were still clenched.

‘I'll –’ he said tersely, trying to ignore the strange buzzing in his ears. ‘I'll leave you to rest –’

Before he finished, Klaus took his wrist and pulled.

* * *

‘Seeing you jealous,’ he said, ‘was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

‘Let go –’

Despite his state, Klaus was able to pull Taki onto the bed beside him. Taki tried half-heartedly to resist, mindful of where they were and, more importantly, the state of Klaus' face and body. He was pressed against Klaus’ chest in only a matter of seconds. The sharp smell of the hospital was replaced by Klaus' familiar scent, tinged with sweat.

Now that the minefield of a conversation with Meiji was over, Klaus let himself bask in the wholly unexpected treat of his master’s jealousy. He tried to cast his mind back and wondered at the possibility that Taki had always harboured such feelings towards the emperor. 

He smiled.

‘Is it because I call him _sama?_ ’

Taki, red in the face, clicked his tongue and tried to pull away again.

‘I could call you _sama,_  if you like.’

‘Klaus, let go –’

Klaus bent down to kiss his neck, the scent of roses rushing to his head almost as powerfully as the morphine. He knew he could have handled the situation graciously for Taki’s sake. But it was as though he couldn’t help himself.

‘He's quite beautiful, don't you think?’ he said, his words swimming in mischief. ‘And he's not wrong. I have always wondered what it would be like to be emperor's knight.’

Taki’s humiliation and anxiety reached its peak.

‘Not everything is a joke,’ he snapped.

After a few seconds, Klaus took his chin in hand. He saw real hurt.

‘Did you really think I considered leaving you? Even for a second?’

Guilt and inadequacy started to leak into the corners of Taki’s frustration. He thought of them laughing. He thought of the light that they both seemed to bring into the room. He allowed himself the poisonous thought of how much happier Klaus would be as the emperor’s knight.

Klaus misread his look. He thought about what Meiji had said.

‘Could he really have ordered you to give me up?’

‘Yes,’ Taki said, eyes downcast. And still, reticently worried.

Klaus let out his short bark of a laugh.

‘I'd like to see him try.’ He trapped Taki against his chest as though to reinforce the point. ‘He could bring his whole damn army for all I care.’

He tilted Taki’s face towards him and kissed his mouth, holding the back of Taki’s head in a light grip to prevent him from pulling away. When he let go, Taki’s face was a different kind of flushed.

‘The doctor might come in –’

‘I love you,’ Klaus murmured. ‘I'm yours. Only yours.’

Taki's heart pounded as Klaus pulled him beneath his chin. He suddenly forgot that he had been trying to resist.

All was quiet for several seconds. Even the sounds of water moving outside had ceased.

‘Thank you,’ said Klaus, his voice suddenly sounding as though it had lost all wind. ‘For fighting for me.’

With his cheek pressed against Klaus’ neck, Taki allowed himself another few seconds there before drawing back to look at him. He gently touched, through the gauze, the cut on Klaus’ face that would leave a deep scar for the rest of his life.

 _You've fought enough times for me_.

Klaus seemed to hear him. He smiled tiredly.

‘Will you stay until I'm asleep?’

Taki nodded.

Klaus shifted lower on the bed until he was able to rest his head on Taki's chest. He sighed long and loud, as though coming to rest after a lifetime of struggles, but his smile lingered somewhere.

Taki's arms hovered in the air above Klaus for a moment before they lowered. His hold, hesitant at first, steadily tightened. After a few seconds, he moved a hand protectively to the side of Klaus' face. Over the scar he was already beginning to love.

The clouds that had gathered while Taki tended to survivors in Roskilde had long since crossed the mountains. The colour of the sunshine outside was slowly beginning to fade. A light drizzle fell over the grounds before the sun vanished completely, creating a small rainbow over the pond that went unnoticed.

Klaus fell asleep in Taki’s arms.

Not long afterwards, the doctor came in and Taki still didn't move.

The doctor was quite taken aback by the sight of them like that, but the look on the commander’s face was so firm and expressionless that the doctor was suddenly left wondering whether there was, in fact, anything strange about it.


	35. Decision

_Enough._

_Enough now._

As the day wore on, inching towards sunset, the creatures by the edge of the pond began to roost, Klaus slept, and Taki held him.

The same words came to him over and over again. After a while, he couldn’t be sure if they were being chanted in his own voice or if they came from elsewhere; echoes of gods who had been looking out for him for years and only then made themselves heard.

_Enough._

The message was simple. It was true. It was a pulsing reminder of everything they had been through. Everything Klaus had been through. The cut on his face would be a lifelong testament to his suffering.

Suffering for which Taki was responsible.

He had sent Klaus to Eurote. He had waited with bated breath when he sent Klaus into the belly of a nuclear research facility. He had sent Klaus on Operation Hannibal where he escaped by a hair’s breadth. He had sent him across the water in the  _Arai_ where the same thing had happened.

And before that.

Taki had sent him to No Man's Land and Klaus had come back to him washed up on a riverbank, barely alive.

And even before.

The surprise air raid during which Haruki’s panicked voice told him that the captain had been injured trying to protect him. Haruki's scream when enemy soldiers found them.

The silence that followed in the wake of Haruki’s transmission was the longest and loudest that Taki would ever experience in his life. He remembered how the eyes of Azusa and the rest of the Murakumo crew were on him, tense and expectant, waiting for their commander to give them an order.

And when Klaus’ voice finally filled his head, a drawl that was only slightly breathless and through which Taki could hear his smile, it felt as though there was not enough air in the tank. He had forgotten the war. He had forgotten Azusa, who was nearby and was able to see the tears that dotted Taki's eyes.

That was the first time.

Now, more than ten months later as he held Klaus’ still form in the Royal Hospital, Taki realised how that time – the first time he thought he had lost Klaus – had changed him completely. Until then, nothing had been more important than the war. Nothing had been more important than upholding his vows and being the vanguard of his people.

But there, suddenly, he had been confronted with something that was more important. Someone for whom he would let everything else slide.

After the enemy retreated that day and Klaus zoomed back to Murakumo’s side, Taki was still grappling with the magnitude of it. He couldn’t face Klaus. He couldn’t come to terms with the blood seeping through Klaus' sleeve nor the crude bandage Klaus had tied over it in order to keep fighting. He couldn’t face the wide smile. The golden eyes that flashed in the sun when he flipped his goggles up.

And so Taki did the only thing he could. He turned from Klaus. Without a backwards glance, he ordered Murakumo to move out. Klaus had been left there alone on his bike, waiting for something Taki couldn't give.

That was the day Klaus had forced him to his knees in the shower.

Thrown him onto the bed.

Pinned him there.

Taken him.

The look in Klaus' eyes was something that Taki had seen in bursts ever since, but nothing had ever been quite like that.

And then, in a sudden wave, the awful memory invaded all five of his senses. The hoarseness of Klaus' voice, which had chilled him to the bone. The unbelievable, tearing pain when he forced his way into Taki’s body. How it felt as though Klaus was breaking him into more and more pieces with each plunge. He remembered the taste of his own blood and the smell of Klaus on the sheets. Strangely enough, more than any of it, he remembered the sharp pain in his neck when Klaus reached down to jerk his head back, unflinchingly, venomously, with a fistful of hair.

Taki had begged him to stop in a voice that was so weak and frantic that he barely recognised himself. He had retreated further and further into denial; into a place where the man he loved wasn’t capable of doing such a thing to him. In the few moments before he passed out, he was back in Luckenwalde where Klaus had held his face so tenderly and kissed him for the first time.

_Forgive me._

A drop fell onto Klaus’ hair. Taki glanced down in surprise. He touched the place near the crown of Klaus’ head where his hair had slightly darkened.

And suddenly more tears were falling.

He didn't understand why that day came to him again so vividly as he held Klaus in that hospital bed. He didn’t consider it something he had willfully or even subconsciously held back. And yet, it felt as though his tears had been waiting for the right moment to be shed.

And so he cried. He cried not for himself, nor for what Klaus had done to him. He cried because it was on that terrible day in Klaus’ shed when he first understood the extent of Klaus’ anguish. His anger and sorrow and desperate love. He finally saw how his constant dismissals and rejections and contempt had compounded the silent traumas of Klaus’ past and driven him to madness.

Taki had only ever witnessed that pain twice more in his entire life. The first when Suguri, against Klaus’ orders, had led Taki into that basement room of the Reizen compound. Where Klaus had writhed and lashed out and sunk his teeth into Taki’s shoulder in his morphine-induced state of half-sleep, and where Taki had done all he could to hold himself together, and hold Klaus together, in front of Suguri.

The second was over the phone just a few days earlier when Klaus spoke Taki’s name. That time, Taki didn’t even have to see it to feel it. He could feel Klaus’ terrifying, unbending resolve to barrel through anything and everything in his way to get to Taki. All for Taki. Always for Taki.

_Enough._

With another scar to add to those that were less visible, Klaus slept peacefully in Taki’s arms, unaware that his master was crying for him.

_Enough now._

And suddenly, Taki remembered Klaus swinging Heinrich to his shoulders. Klaus humming along to the radio in Wilhelm's truck as he reached over to squeeze Taki’s knee. Klaus' smile beneath dripping bangs the day he ran indoors out of a sudden downpour.

Taki’s tears stopped as abruptly as they came.

At the same moment that he made his decision, the heron outside suddenly burst from the rushes and took flight across the length the pond.

* * *

It had always been fraught with danger, but the plan itself was simple enough.

Tachibana and Rossi had arranged for the demonstration to take place right outside the nation, right on Meiji’s doorstep, so the raw power of this new weapon would singe him and spur him to action. They reasoned that the crew of the cargo train as well as a handful of civilian casualties, farmers most of them, were a fair price to pay.

They didn’t at all expect their little demonstration to have the kind of impact that it did.

The devastation was beyond anything Tachibana had envisioned. With an immediate blast radius of nearly three kilometres, plus the fallout and aftereffects extending for a further thirty beyond that, the entire area of Roskilde was declared a no-travel zone. Over four hundred people had perished instantly, with several hundred more bearing the memory of that day forever more on their skin and flesh.

In the years to come, scientists would cautiously moved through the area wearing hazmat suits, trying to determine why crops refused to grow. Why the effects of radiation would be felt in the survivors and even their unborn children.

In the immediate aftermath, the stories of the victims shocked the world; accounts of how the blast seemed to flatten and eviscerate everything in sight, the downward spirals of radiation sickness, the ghastly burns, the piling list of side effects that continued to crop up and astound doctors.

Somewhat shell-shocked leaders of the former Western Alliance stepped before cameras to offer their sincerest condolences to all those who suffered in Roskilde. When pressed about whether they themselves were developing the same technology, the questions were swiftly sidestepped and politicians vanished off stage.

 _Let’s hope,_ Meiji had thought to himself, _it will be enough of a warning._

He himself had taken all responsibility. Although no amount of investigations could ever conclusively determine its cause, the accident had taken place on an eastern train carrying nuclear material developed on eastern soil. He spared no expense in ensuring that the survivors would receive the finest treatment available and that all possible search and rescue efforts would be carried out in the region.

Tachibana and Rossi didn’t need to speak to one another. It was clear to them both, separately, that it had all gone in the opposite direction to that which they had intended.

Nothing could be traced back to him, but Tachibana paced fretfully yet again, worried that each visitor at his door were members of the Imperial Guard come to place him under arrest. The only time he was summoned to the palace, however, had been alongside Otto Hanovich and his team of scientists, to try to understand more about the cause of the disaster – how many canisters were on board, what kind of accident may have triggered the impact, how to contain such a thing in the future.

When each report was placed before him, Tachibana found he didn’t need to put on a face in order to convey his shock over the extent of the damage. Afterwards, he was dismissed without any further questions. No one asked him his whereabouts during the explosion. No one stumbled onto the fourth warehouse in his province.

And yet, for the next few years, Tachibana jumped slightly each time someone arrived at the front door.

Rossi sat quietly in his room before the large framed picture of the world. It didn’t take long for him to understand that he had a very limited range of options. If the press or any spies sent by Meiji got wind of Eurote’s progress in developing nuclear arms, he knew he wouldn't be able to maintain his already tenuous hold on power.

So the only phone call he needed to place was one to his Defence Minister, discreetly ending all further research and development into the nuclear project.

‘For the time being,’ he had added.

 _For now,_ Klaus had written in his second letter to Claudia.

For now.

For the time being.

For, as Taki was steadily beginning to understand, only the dead see the end of war.

They ended one after it started. They were trying, now, to stop one before it started. But in some way, if they stayed there and adhered to duty, they would always be fighting.

He wondered whether his decision had been made there, in a hospital room in the capital, or in Murakumo when he thought he lost Klaus for the first time, or as far back as Luckenwalde when he murmured a few words beneath the laburnums in a language Klaus didn’t yet understand.

He thought for long hours in silence.

Each time Klaus shifted in his sleep, Taki would adjust his own body to make him comfortable. Eventually, he was sitting up against the railing of the bed with Klaus half curled on his lap. Taki's hands curved around his face and he remembered how he had done the same thing once, what felt like a lifetime ago. He hoped they had come a long way since then.

Doctors and nurses grew used to Taki's presence. They checked monitors and the state of Klaus’ wounds without paying him any mind and they reported Klaus' progress to him in hushed tones. The cut on Klaus’ face was beginning to look slightly better. The swelling was less angry and the redness had faded somewhat. Taki wondered what it would look like when it healed; how it might move or fold in on itself each time Klaus smiled.

* * *

The sun was close to setting by the time Klaus awoke.

He blinked and opened his eyes a fraction. Taki’s hand on his face was the first thing he felt. He tilted his head up and met his steady gaze.

‘You’re still here.’

Taki’s eyes softened. He was grateful that Klaus hadn’t seen him a few hours earlier when he had been unable to control his tears.

‘How are you feeling? Do you need anything?’

Klaus made a small noise of refusal. He slowly turned onto his back with his eyes still closed and his head still resting comfortably on Taki’s thighs. The left side of his face was a bizarre combination of sore and numb. He tried not to think about it.

Still, he felt less heavy. His mind was a lot clearer than than it was a few hours when Taki and Meiji had unsubtly tried to claim rights to Klaus’ fate. He wondered if he had dreamt it.

‘Klaus,’ Taki began slowly. ‘I’ll have to go soon.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Klaus a little groggily.

‘And I might not be able to come back for a while.’

Klaus opened his eyes again.

‘I won’t be far. I’ll just be… busy.’

The sun dragged its last orange rays across the ceiling.

_What else is new?_

The thought flashed across Klaus' mind in a way that was tired rather than irate. In fact, he experienced a sort of fond resignation.

He could only imagine the kind of after-effects that would follow something like Roskilde. Taki’s country and emperor needed him. And if not Roskilde, there would be things, there would always be things, that Taki would prioritise over Klaus. Such was the life he had chosen.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ he said.

Taki’s heart skipped a beat. He almost held his breath. Though he didn’t think he had given himself away, there were times, those days, when it almost seemed as though he and Klaus could read one another’s thoughts. And so maybe –

‘It’s my sliced-up face, isn’t it? You can’t stand the sight of it.’

A rush of relief, guilt and love combined to make Taki smile. A small curve of the lips that somehow filled Klaus’ chest.

Drops of gold shining at the bottom of the river, he thought.

‘They’ll discharge you in a few days,’ Taki said softly. ‘Maybe a week. I’ll come by as often as I can.’

Klaus shifted up slightly so the top of his head gently pressed into Taki's stomach. He lifted a hand to touch Taki's face.

‘Okay.’

 _If you don’t_ , he was on the point of adding, _I might just run away with the emperor._

But, bowing to his better judgment for once, he decided not to ruin the moment.

* * *

Though Klaus remained somewhat hopeful, Taki was true to his word. Over the following week, they only saw one another twice more. Both times, though Taki seemed genuinely pleased to see how much he was recovering, it was as though he was hidden behind a veil of distraction.

‘How’s everything out there?’ Klaus asked.

‘Better,’ Taki cautiously replied, more often than not.

He gave him a rundown of it all. The state of the victims of Roskilde and the state of world affairs. The uncertainty surrounding the nuclear situation in each nation. The most recent findings of Meiji’s Nuclear Committee, whose campaign to prevent any further disasters were made public and already well underway. Things that Klaus had heard in snippets through the wireless at his bedside but which Taki would deliver with fresh insight and clarity.

Klaus watched him carefully, trying to see whether speaking of such things sharpened Taki’s focus. But even then, Taki's mind seemed to be elsewhere. He would often cast glances out of the window and be lost to Klaus for a few seconds at a time.

He wondered if he should simply ask. But the strong possibility that Taki would dismiss his question and turn away always stopped him short.

After all this time, he still couldn’t stand it when Taki turned away from him.

* * *

Nearly a week after Klaus was first admitted, the doctor spoke to Taki about discharging him.

Klaus stood at the window, stretching gingerly, trying to feel out the areas of his chest that still flared up like little flames. He was relieved to be out of his hospital robe and back in his own clothes. He absently examined the cut on his face using the hazy reflection on the window. The stitches were gone and, like the nurse promised, it was already beginning to look better.

The nurse herself was in the room along with a colleague, replacing Klaus’ sheets while he was up and about.

‘I would recommend that he stays for another day or so,’ the doctor was telling Taki. ‘I’d be happy to let him go today itself if he can promise not to over-exert himself. Bed rest and minimal movement.’

Sensing Taki's uncertainty from the quality of his silence, Klaus looked over his shoulder.

‘When have I ever gone against doctor’s orders?’ he said jovially.

Taki caught his eye before turning back to the doctor.

‘Another day might be best,’ he said, his tone quiet.

Klaus sighed. The doctor seemed somewhat relieved. 

After the doctor left, Taki took a few moments to watch as Klaus scrutinised his own face in the window, his yellow hair flush with sunlight. Taki thought he saw, in Klaus' expression, a rare glimpse of something very close to insecurity.

Out of nowhere, Taki was gripped by the urge to walk to Klaus, tug him by the front of his thin cotton shirt and kiss him in front of the nurses.

With his back turned, Klaus didn't get to see the heat that touched Taki's cheeks. His focus moved past his reflection to the pond outside. The Throne Room could be glimpsed on the far side behind the small arched bridge. Not far from where he was, he spied the rushes among which the heron sometimes wandered, poking about for fish.

‘So what’s happening out there?’ Klaus asked, looking at the fortress-like walls surrounding the palace grounds.

Still a little red and trying to both understand and forget his reckless surge of desire, Taki cleared his throat. He thought about everything he still had to do. The meetings he had scheduled.

‘I can’t today, Klaus,’ he said falteringly. ‘I have to go. I need to be at the Miyazu province in an hour to meet Ayabe and…’

Klaus turned to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Taki said, seeing his look of disappointment.

‘You just got here.’

‘I know. But I’ll – I’ll send someone to collect you tomorrow after you’ve been discharged.’

‘You won’t be here tomorrow either?’ said Klaus, in a tone he knew Claudia would have compared to Heinrich’s.

_If things are proving… difficult… with your current situation…_

Unbidden, Meiji’s voice came to Taki again.

He had tried his best to put aside the overwrought emotion from that day, but, at times, the most barbed and acerbic of Meiji’s words would come to him. Especially those ones. He wondered, again, what Klaus had told the emperor that would have prompted him to say that. He was too ashamed to ask.

The expression on Taki's face was one that always immediately doubled back on Klaus. He tried to arrange his features into one of nonchalance.

‘Ah, don’t worry about it,’ he said with a smile. ‘Just don’t send Ogura. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who seems to hate me more than Hasebe. Where are you finding these guys?’

Staring at Klaus' broad chest, Taki tried not to think about the little pieces of metal and debris that had burrowed into his flesh only a week ago.

 _Forgive me,_ he sent to Klaus silently. _One last time._

‘I’ll see you tomorrow evening at the residence, if I get back in time,’ he said. ‘Try to rest today.’

Klaus watched for a sign, but Taki, for all intents and purposes, seemed fine.

‘Roger that,’ he said, trying to keep things light.

With the nurses still there, tucking the bedclothes into tight hospital corners, there wasn’t much Taki could do besides hold Klaus’ gaze for a moment longer before turning to leave.

Klaus watched his coat flap out of sight before he relaxed his would-be nonchalant smile.

It came back in full force, pulling rather painfully at the muscles of his left cheek, when he overheard the hushed conversation of the nurses.

‘There it is again.’

‘What?’

‘Can’t you smell it? I keep thinking there are flowers in here.’

* * *

The next day, a few hours before he was due to be discharged, Emperor Meiji visited Klaus one last time.

Shortly before he arrived, Klaus left his bed, walked slowly to the window and opened it. The little shooting pains in his chest had lessened a great deal overnight. He drew out the little package of wrapped herring that he had managed to smuggle back with him from the palace kitchen that morning, after he told the doctor he felt well enough for a short walk. He remembered how the little maid had beamed when she saw him and rushed to find some fish before he even asked.

With a small smile, he found himself wondering whether a part of him might miss the Royal Hospital and grounds.

The heron awaited in the nearby rushes and, after hearing the sound of the window opening, it picked its delicate way over, raising each scaled leg with the poise of a dancer. Klaus leaned far out of the window to see if the bird would take the fish straight out of his hand. It hesitated.

‘Come on,’ he urged gently. ‘It’s the last time I’m seeing you. Surely you trust me by now, you long-legged bas–’

‘I hear,’ said a voice from behind him, ‘that you’re the cause of a herring shortage in the kitchens.’

Klaus bumped the back of his head against the window frame. The fish fell to the grass where the heron nimbly picked it up and swallowed it whole.

Hand on his head, Klaus turned to face the emperor.

Floor-length yellow robes embroidered with glistening red thread, hair in a stately artwork atop his head with no headdress. And a smile that Klaus felt like he’d known for years.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said with a quick, practiced bow.

‘That’s a shame,’ Meiji said evenly. ‘While you were still partially under the effects of medication, you felt unencumbered enough to call me by my name, which came as a relief of sorts. I was rather in danger of forgetting what it is.’

His two attendants remained by the door, secretly relieved that the young commander wasn’t visiting at the same time.

Klaus also remembered that episode only too well, despite his half-addled state at the time. And so his reply, though still genial, was somewhat cautious.

‘I’ll stick to proper etiquette for a change, Your Majesty.’

Meiji smiled.

‘Perfectly understandable. I won’t keep you long, Captain. I heard you’ll be leaving soon and I wanted to take the time to thank you properly for everything you did in Eurote.’

Nervous caution gave way a little and Klaus felt humbled once more. He wondered how many people in the world could claim that they were visited by His Imperial Majesty in hospital, not once but twice.

‘I was just doing my job, Your Grace.’

‘Regardless, I shudder to think what might have happened if Taki hadn’t sent you with me.’

Meiji’s look was a little sharper than before. More serious than Klaus was used to.

Klaus glanced down at his cotton shirt and trousers and suddenly felt sorely under dressed. He also sheepishly held the newspaper-wrapped fish in his hand and hoped it wasn’t giving off too strong a smell.

The emperor looked at it too.

‘According to my chamberlain,’ he said, his tone much lighter, ‘the defiant and somewhat flustered kitchen maid insisted it was because you... asked nicely.’

Klaus chuckled.

‘I didn’t think “asking nicely” would work anymore, with my face like this. She didn’t seem to mind it though.’

‘I tried telling you earlier, Captain. For men of your calibre, scars are an asset. And please,’ he said, his hand making a small gesture towards the window where a hopeful heron awaited, ‘don’t let me interrupt.’

Despite Meiji’s acquiescence, Klaus never did discover whether the heron had grown to trust him enough to eat from his hand. With a regretful smile, he simply tossed the newspaper to the ground where the delighted bird feasted.

* * *

‘Your Majesty, I have to ask,’ Klaus said, feeling nervous again. ‘About last time –’

‘You’re wondering whether I really would have threatened your master with death in order to have you.’

Klaus didn’t know whether to blush at his phrasing or to bristle at the thought of anyone threatening Taki with death, even idly.

‘I wasn’t sure I understood what you were doing –’

‘I assure you, at no point was I serious about any of my threats,’ Meiji said, his eyes and lips the very picture of self-possession.

Klaus had suspected as much.

‘Then why did you…?’

‘In my experience,’ Meiji began, placing a subtle, delicate emphasis on each syllable, ‘people like Taki – the ones who hold their true feelings inside a fortress – sometimes need a little urging to let the drawbridge down.’

There was a small pause. Though Meiji’s expression didn't alter in the slightest, Klaus knew he was referring to someone he had lost long ago. And it occurred to Klaus, again with no small amount of humility, that he alone knew the emperor’s secret.

He processed what Meiji had done for a few moments, feeling a mixture of gratitude and exasperation.

‘So it was all a… ruse?’

‘Not entirely. I do still need a permanent head of my Imperial Guard.’ Meiji fixed him with a look. ‘And I would be willing to part with a great deal for it to be you.’

Klaus smiled.

‘Not a chance, I'm afraid.’

Meiji tilted his head very slightly, almost in a sign of deference.

‘That part I always knew.’

* * *

Meiji walked slowly back to the Throne Room, following the perfectly in-sync footsteps of the two guards before him. He thought about the specific way the cut on Klaus' cheek moved when he smiled. It would take the shape of a lightning strike before Klaus relaxed his muscles again.

He was gratified to hear that his little bid for Klaus had momentarily inspired a burst of affection from his master. He was more curious, however, about what the young prince had been up to since then.

‘I'm not sure your little trick changed much in the long run, Your Grace,’ Klaus had said, with a seemingly off-hand grin. ‘I’ve barely seen him over the past week. Can't really blame him, though, after Roskilde and everything.’

Meiji had remained silent. After the first two days of investigations where Taki had gone before the Nuclear Committee to give an eyewitness account of what had happened, Meiji hadn’t seen much of Taki either. In fact, Taki's chamberlain Ogura had called the palace excusing Taki from several meetings with world leaders and press in the days after that. Meiji had passed on his consent, assuming Taki had momentarily shirked his duties in order to remain by Klaus’ side.

‘His help has been invaluable,’ Meiji carefully replied. 

‘But you know,’ Klaus said, his tone shifting slightly. Meiji noticed Klaus had relaxed into their usual open banter since the emperor had revealed his benign intentions. ‘It might sound strange, but I feel like Taki’s had just the one thing on his mind for months, even before all of this started. I can’t think what it might be.’ He then smiled at Meiji a little self-consciously, like they were veterans of the same battle. ‘I'm probably imagining it.’

 _Interesting_ , the emperor thought. It was something he himself had seen in Taki, as far back as when he summoned both commander and captain into his private quarters for the first time.

In the Throne Room, he carefully lowered himself to the cushion atop the raised platform. He was still thinking about it when Ayabe was brought before him.

‘Your Majesty, thank you for seeing me,’ the shogun began, appearing a little troubled. ‘It’s… it’s about Taki-sama.’

Meiji lifted his eyebrows.

‘He’s – he came to me yesterday. With a strange set of requests. I feel like I might be betraying his trust coming to you, but I thought it would be prudent to let you know…’

‘Tell me,’ Meiji said at once.

* * *

Only the dead see the end of war.

They ended one after it started. They were trying, now, to stop one before it started. But in some way, if they stayed there and adhered to duty, they would always be fighting.

Taki had gone through everything like a checklist. It took him a little longer than expected, given how difficult it had been to see each of the other shoguns without very much notice. Ayabe had been the most receptive. And the one whom Taki trusted the most to keep things in order.

He climbed the steps to the shrine where he had been told he would find Yura, the eldest of his sisters who had left home a year ago. As he walked, he replayed the conversation he had just had with Yura’s birth mother, Sumi, who was slowly regaining her health in a ward on Taki’s estate.

‘It’ll be a while,’ she had said, the corners of her eyes crinkling warmly. ‘But I as soon as I’m out, those girls will be so smothered in love, they won’t have time to miss their brother.’

Taki had remained silent, staring into the eyes of the woman who had been a loving mother to the girls and who at times, before her health had deteriorated, had even been a surrogate mother to Taki as well. He remembered how he had told Yura to watch over Sumi the very morning he left for Luckenwalde and his latent guilt, like Wilhelm’s, that he was abandoning her when she needed him most.

He hoped that everything he was leaving to her would make up for it all.

‘There’s… there’s someone I want you to meet,’ he said before the thought even came to him properly. ‘If you’re well enough to come to the residence in the next week.’

Sumi had smiled weakly.

‘I’d love to meet him.’

Taki had always been surprised at how those who were closest to him always seemed to know. Even Hebe, who had watched him closely the night before during dinner, seemed to carry a sly omniscience in her eyes after he gently broke the news to her and Midori and Chiyeko.

A few minutes later, Taki watched Hebe patiently rolling back Midori’s sleeve before it dipped into her soup dish. Ever since their mother had been sent away to recover, Hebe had taken her two younger siblings under her wing. Much the same way, Taki realised, as Yura did before she left to become a priestess.

‘We’ll be fine, Onii-sama,’ Hebe said. Taki had also noticed the shift in her honorifics from _chan_ to _sama._ ‘Before you even said a word, I was already happy for you.’

Taki had paused and looked at her.

‘What do you mean?’

Hebe’s smile was beyond her ten years.

‘Onii-sama, you should have seen your face before you started talking. I’ve never seen you blush like that before!’

Midori, despite being the hardest hit by the news, giggled heartily at this. Beside her, Chiyeko did the same. Though he was almost sure that none of them could possibly know what they were laughing about, Taki blushed once more and returned to his food.

There was only one sister he had left to tell. He was almost at the top of the steps to the shrine.

It had come as a huge surprise to him when, upon returning from Luckenwalde, he was met by the demure, downturned gaze of his eldest sister beneath the heavy raiment of her priestess’ cloak and headdress. For a moment, he felt irrationally guilty, as though his own sins that had pushed her, somehow, to give up her own life as repentance.

At the top of the steps, he was surprised to find not only his sister, who was swathed in beautiful, modest robes of white and orange, but also Tachibana’s young son, Douman.

Taki stiffened when he saw him. In a little flash, he recalled how Douman had sworn with such fervour to watch over the Reizen daughters while their brother was in the west.

‘Onii-sama!’ Yura said, more surprised than pleased.

She came to him and bowed low. Douman followed at a more uncertain pace and bowed from his waist. Taki realised with a start that the boy was almost seventeen. Nearly two years had passed since he had first set foot for Luckenwalde.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Taki asked, a little more sharply than he intended.

Yura looked immediately worried but Douman spoke up for himself.

‘Taki-sama, I know what my father has done,’ he said tersely. ‘I know he's partly responsible for everything that... But I – I’m not like him. I don’t support anything he – I –’

While he stuttered, Taki glanced between him and his sister. He thought he recognised the look in Yura’s eye and felt an unfamiliar surge of protectiveness.

‘I’d like to speak to my sister alone,’ he said curtly.

Douman’s mouth closed and he nodded once before descending the steps.

Yura’s face was beseeching.

‘You didn’t have to be like that, Onii-sama. He’s telling the truth.’

Taki looked at her for a few moments, her doleful eyes and small, rather beautiful mouth, and wondered if he was brave enough to ask.

‘Is… is there something between you? And him?’

Her cheeks coloured and she couldn't think of a reply. Taki's suspicion and sense of indignation went up a notch.

‘Was it while I was at Luckenwalde?’

‘Don’t be silly, Onii-sama! We were only fifteen then.’

But she turned away.

From the shrine’s elevated position, they could see the sparkle of the Reizen lake in the distance. Taki tried to feel the peacefulness of the small, echoing stone room in its little green cave of canopy, but he was finding it difficult given the new, unexpected little drama he had stumbled onto.

‘He... asked me to marry him,’ she finally said in a small voice. ‘A few months ago.’

Another surge of protectiveness, at a much higher temperature than before.

‘What?’

‘I told him no,’ Yura said, turning back. ‘I'm bound to the temple now. But…’

She tried searching her brother’s eyes, wondering how to make her perfect, dutiful older brother understand something like this.

‘But sometimes I feel like I could give it up. For him.’ She flailed a little, hearing her own words. ‘I know you’ll say I’m being foolish –’

To her surprise, she saw him flush, just as she had done earlier, and cast his gaze to the ground.

‘Onii-sama?’

‘I just went to see your mother,’ Taki said, trying to change the subject as smoothly as he could. ‘She’s much better.’

‘Isn’t it wonderful? They say she’ll only need another few months and she can come back home.’

‘It is. It’s a relief. Especially because… there’s something I have to tell you, Yura-nii-sama.’

She watched him, wide-eyed and expectant.

A few minutes later, when Taki reached the bottom step of the shrine, he noticed that Douman Tachibana was hovering by one of the guardian statues that was carved into the shape of a wolf. His long face and stern eyebrows reminded Taki strongly of his father.

Their eyes met and Douman tensed.

‘You remember what he was like two years ago, right, Onii-sama?’ Yura had asked when the topic turned back to Douman. ‘Before you left for the west. How true and loyal he was. He’s still the same now. He says he wants nothing more to do with his father or his family and that if we ever get married, he would come with me to the Reizen home and we'd help take care of the girls. Doesn’t that sound like a dream?’

Taki took a steady breath and tried to think of how Meiji had said there was no sense in making early enemies.

Douman, for his part, felt like he was again being reduced to nothing beneath the iciness of Taki Reizen’s glare. There was no chance, he realised with a sinking heart, that Yura’s brother would ever –

‘If she says yes,’ Taki said, stiffly and suddenly. ‘Take care of her. And the rest of my sisters.’

For a moment, Douman didn’t know what to do or say. It would take him days to come to terms with the fact that, in those few seconds, he had received tacit approval from his future brother-in-law; the daunting, near-legendary shogun and commander. Douman remembered himself just in time and bowed.

‘You – you have my word, Taki-sama,’ he said, his cheeks as red as Yura’s had been.

Taki left the temple grounds, realising how strange it was that he had simply come to seek leave from his eldest sister and instead glimpsed something that ran a lot deeper than he had the imagination for. When he reached the car where his driver held the door open for him, he found himself wondering about love that sprang out of the Earth everywhere, unexpected and precious and illicit and, somehow, always pure.

He turned to see Douman take the stairs back up to the shrine three at a time.

* * *

That evening, Taki finally drew up to the Reizen residence and was told that Klaus, who had arrived some hours prior, had fallen asleep. Taki stood in the doorway to Klaus' room, seeing how his left leg was sprawled over the side of his raised futon, his large foot resting on the floor. In the darkness, Taki thought he could even glimpse the cut across Klaus' cheek. Battling a familiar broth of guilt and desire, Taki turned from the room to let him rest.

The following morning, before Klaus awoke, Taki was back in the car, bound this time for the capital.

His hands were clenched again. They had been for the entire drive for a variety of reasons, some more rational than others. He stared at them in his lap. He was wearing his uniform in place of his usual ceremonial robes but, by then, he knew Meiji enough to know that he wouldn’t mind in the least.

There were only two more people he needed to speak to. One of them was the emperor.

He knew he was, in essence, asking permission. He was also aware that it was in Meiji’s power to refuse. In which case, everything Taki had done and planned would come to nothing.

He remembered the steely glint in Meiji’s eye when he very nearly ordered Taki to give Klaus up. At the time, Taki had stood beside Klaus’ bed in the hospital room, inundated with images of the two of them together; both those he had actually seen, where their smiles always seemed to communicate something Taki didn’t understand, and those he had imagined in short, torturous flashes. Images of Meiji’s long, curtain-like hair and Klaus' large body in various contortions which caused him to blush at himself angrily.

_If need be, I’ll order you to release Klaus of his duty to you and turn him over._

_I won’t._

_I won’t give him up. Not even – Not even if you order it. I won’t give him up._

It would be the first time Taki and Meiji faced one another properly since that heated exchange. He tried to calm his nerves.

And yet, as he walked past the falling petals emblazoned on the murals of the entrance hall and passed into the Throne Room, he felt distinctly anxious for a variety of reasons. Some more rational than others.

He worried especially about how he might broach the topic. How to bring up the singular decision he made. The one implausible, impossible, heretical, irrevocable decision he made that had taken up so much of his thoughts and days.

As it turned out, that was one thing worry he didn't need to worry about at all. Not long after he knelt before Meiji, the first words out of the emperor’s mouth launched them headfirst into the future.

‘I think I may have figured out what you’re doing, Taki,’ Meiji said, his gaze as steady and his smile as enigmatic as ever. ‘And that Klaus doesn’t know yet, does he?’


	36. Klaus' Silence

Klaus sat alone in a sea of gold, staring across at the beige rim of distant mountains. He wondered how far away they were. How long it would take to reach them if he just got up and started walking right then and there.

Strange thoughts like that had been occurring to him in recent weeks, and he couldn’t quite figure out why or what they meant. Or where they were leading. But he found himself envying birds and butterflies and even the leaves that tumbled about in the breeze. He was so preoccupied with his thoughts about the mountains, imagining how they would look passing far beneath him, that he didn’t hear the approach of soft footfalls.

‘There you are.’

Beatrice sat beside her youngest son and brushed her hair back with a deft, almost impatient movement of her hand that Klaus knew well.

‘I could hardly see you in the stalks,’ she said blithely. ‘Your hair’s the same colour as the wheat!’

Klaus grinned.

‘So’s your hair,’ he pointed out.

‘True. I gave you my hair and eyes,’ she said, repeating the little mantra that Klaus had heard time and again. She held his chin and gritted her teeth affectionately. ‘But you have your Papa’s strong jaw.’

Smiling and blushing slightly, Klaus pulled away. At ten years old, he knew he was getting too old to be coddled by his mother despite the guilty comfort he drew from it.

‘Uncle Hartmann said you were watching the planes the whole time today,’ she said, stretching her legs out before her and crossing them.

‘I was,’ Klaus said eagerly, thinking back to the air show. ‘You were really good!’

She beamed at him. Her shoulder-length hair flew back in the breeze, fluttering alongside the short red scarf around her neck. She wore her trousers with the masculine cut; a pair that had always aggrieved Claudia, who, at fifteen, considered herself at the forefront of women’s fashion.

_Your mother’s really something, isn’t she? Too dazzling for those of us left behind on the ground._

‘We talked about you a lot, me and your uncle,’ Beatrice said with a playful lilt. ‘He said you’re getting really tall for your age. At this rate, you might end up taller than your father.’

A flare of happiness at the thought.

‘Really?’

In Klaus’ mind, his silent father always seemed to be a kind of gentle giant.

Beatrice smiled. ‘Uncle Hartmann also said you were aiming for the sky,’ she said carefully, trying to keep her voice buoyant.

‘Yep!’ Klaus said at once. ‘I’m going to fly in the next war, like you did. And I’ll help win the war for our country. And they’ll give me a medal. And afterwards I’ll fly all around the world and explore the whole thing.’

‘Is that right?’

Klaus leaned back on his hands and stared up at the soft scudding clouds. Beatrice watched him closely and felt a tug of sorrow along with pride. She tried to picture him as an adult. The image would always come through rather hazy.

‘And what’ll you do after that?’

‘After what?’

‘After you’re done flying.’

Klaus tilted his head back to Earth and looked at his mother in confusion.

‘I’ll never want to stop flying.’

The sorrow came to Beatrice in a stronger wave. For a few moments, she wondered if she ought to say anything more.

‘You might one day,’ she said, emotion edging into her voice just slightly. ‘I did. In fact, there was once a time I thought I’d never fly again.’

Klaus sat up in some surprise, his heart beating a touch faster. It was like he had turned the corner and seen a side to his carefree, daredevil mother that she hadn't shared before. He was on the brink of asking why, but the look on her face made him lose his nerve.

Instead he observed, ‘But you’re flying now.’

‘I sure am.’

‘So why’d you change your mind?’

He was relieved to see her smile.

‘I met your father.’ She looked up at the sky as though their story was etched there. ‘Somehow, when I was lost, he found me. And he brought me back home. And then I wasn’t afraid to fly anymore.’

_And when I did take off again, it wasn’t because I was trying to find something._

She then heard herself and glanced down at her son, who had absorbed each word with wide, intent eyes.

‘Did any of that make sense?’

‘I think so.’

He turned to stare through the wheat stalks before him, his gaze vaguely preoccupied.

Beatrice began to regret where she had taken the conversation; one that had begun so light-heartedly. Wanting to shield her son from what had happened to her was instinctive, but perhaps she was being overly cynical. There was every chance, after all, that the next generation wouldn’t make the the same mistakes.

And either way, she hoped she would be around long enough to protect her child from whatever lay ahead of him.

But before she could conceive of a way to lighten the mood, Klaus spoke up in a sprightly, determined tone.

‘Okay, then. After I’m done flying, I’ll find someone, like you found Papa, who’ll bring me home.’

He paused, feeling as though something was still missing.

‘But we’ll keep a plane in the backyard so we can go anywhere in the world whenever we feel like it.’

Beatrice laughed.

‘That,’ she said, ‘sounds like a wonderful plan.’

Klaus seemed pleased, even though he was aware of how implausible his little addendum sounded.

After a long, comfortable silence, Klaus hesitated.

‘Mama,’ he said slowly.

‘Yes?’

‘I think I found my call sign.’

‘Really? What is it?’

‘I don’t want to say,’ he said, suddenly and uncharacteristically self-conscious.

It was a sight that warmed Beatrice’s heart.

‘Tell me,’ she insisted gently.

Klaus looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

‘Okay.’

He told her in an undertone that she barely heard. Afterwards, there was a small pause.

‘I found it in one of Emmerich’s books,’ he confessed. ‘It means _Werewolf._ ’

His mother’s face broke into a large smile and she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Pride and happiness cocooned him for a moment before he drew away.

‘Mama!’ he protested, his face bright red.

‘Suits you perfectly,’ she said warmly and ran a hand through his hair. ‘My little wolf.’

* * *

Lying beneath the wisteria tree, Klaus waited for Taki and thought of his mother.

That day in the wheat fields – the day he had spoken his call sign aloud for the first time – was one of his strongest memories of childhood. He wondered if his entire life could be mapped out in wheat stalks, laburnums and wisteria.

He absently touched his cheek where Beatrice had kissed it and he was almost surprised when his fingertips met the ridge of his cut.

No, he realised. Not his entire life. There was also the drone of airplane propellers. The roar of his bike. The pain of bullets and shrapnel entering his body. The loss of his men. Things that his mother had tried to protect him from. Things he was glad she hadn’t been around to see.

He tried to breathe steadily to soothe the burgeoning pain in his chest. He had forgotten his painkillers in his room and couldn’t quite bring himself to begin the walk back. So he hoped the pain would somehow magically ebb of its own accord –

_‘Klaus-chan!’_

Two small bodies launched themselves at him from behind the trunk of the tree where they had stealthily crept up on him. One of them landed on his lower abdomen.

Pain exploded in his chest in bright little fireworks. He groaned and curled inwards.

Midori knew immediately that her plan to pleasantly surprise Klaus had backfired. She sprang off him and watched helplessly as he squirmed in the grass before her, making small noises. Standing a little behind her, her older sister Chiyeko also watched wide-eyed.

‘Klaus-chan!’ Midori said, sounding shocked. ‘We’re sorry! We forgot you were hurt!’

Klaus tried to say something.

‘Klaus-chan?’ she tried again nervously, wondering how much trouble she was going to be in for breaking her brother’s knight.

‘I’m fine,’ he said in a strangled voice, blinking through the pain. He glanced up at their terrified faces and almost laughed.

He sat up slowly, trying again to steady his breathing. After gingerly prodding himself, he could tell none of the wounds had opened up again. After a while, he was fit enough to at least pretend that he wasn’t in pain.

‘Are you okay?’ Chiyeko asked.

‘Never better,’ he puffed. ‘But maybe don’t tell your brother you did that. He’ll send me back to hospital for another week.’

That was all the absolution Midori needed.

‘Okay!’ she said happily. She sprawled on the grass on her stomach, unmindful of the small stains it would leave on the front of her kimono. ‘We won’t tell him. We’re really good at keeping secrets, you know!’

Chiyeko sat nearby a little more demurely, keeping a close watch on Klaus for signs of weakness.

‘Are you?’ Klaus said, with a fond smile. He was always struck by how similar Midori’s eyes were to Taki’s.

‘We are!’ Midori said. ‘We know a secret you don’t know!’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah!’

‘If I guess what it is, will you tell me I got it right?’

Midori and Chiyeko consulted one another with a look.

‘Okay!’ Midori said, despite her sister’s obvious discomfort.

‘We can’t!’ Chiyeko said to Midori in a loud whisper. ‘We told Onii-chan we wouldn’t!’

‘But if Klaus-chan _guesses_ , then it’s not like we told him!’ Midori reasoned impetuously.

Klaus’ interest was piqued.

‘What did your Onii-chan tell you not to tell me?’

‘Uh-uh,’ Midori chastised with a smile. ‘You have to guess!’

‘Right.’ Klaus leaned back against the tree, keeping a steady hand on his chest. ‘Is it… about your mother’s visit? Or Yura’s?’

He was looking forward to meeting the two women in Taki’s family whom he had so far only heard about, though Ogura hadn't yet enlightened Klaus as to the reason for their visit.

‘Nope!’ Midori said, already starting to love the game.

‘Uh…’ Klaus ventured. ‘Is it…?’

For the next minute or so, he made terrible guesses that inspired gleeful shakes of the head from his tormenters.

‘Is it about me?’ he finally said, in kindly exasperation.

They glanced at one another.

‘Sort of!’ Midori acceded.

Klaus wasn’t sure why his pulse quickened. He blinked and struggled to come up with a follow-up question. Midori’s patience was starting to give way.

‘Can we give him a clue?’ she asked Chiyeko. ‘He’s really bad at this.’

‘Maybe one,’ Chiyeko said doubtfully.

‘Klaus-chan,’ said Midori without skipping a beat. ‘Remember how Onii-chan went to the west last week?’

‘Yes.’

Klaus didn’t exactly have to rack his brain to recall it. It was Taki’s return from the west that had brought him so close to the Roskilde disaster.

Midori leaned in conspiratorially.

‘Well –’

‘Imouto-chan?’

Taki’s voice made all three turn at once.

* * *

The girls were almost as happy as Klaus was to see him; his presence at home had been as scarce as his visits to the Royal Hospital.

Though suspicious about the fragments of conversation he had heard while he approached, Taki decided to let it slide. Seeing Klaus had sent a wave of nervous energy through him and he couldn’t focus enough to reprimand his sisters.

‘Can you give us a minute?’ he asked them softly.

Klaus wondered if he was imagining the faint flush in Taki’s cheeks.

Taki’s head was still thrumming over his long, surreal conversation with the emperor. The words were so loud and distinct in his mind that he felt as though they were somehow transmitting to others.

Now, finally, having surmounted every other obstacle he could think of, there was only person he had left to speak to.

After the girls left, Klaus began to lift himself from the base of the tree.

‘No, stay there,’ Taki said, seeing the hand Klaus had lifted bracingly to his chest. He went to Klaus and knelt beside him, searching his face.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Like I haven’t seen you in years,’ said Klaus, hoping the smile would counterbalance the hyperbole. It had only been a little over two days, after all, since Taki had visited him in hospital, vacant and distracted though he had been.

‘I’m sorry.’

Klaus took his face in his hand, and took a moment to remember the spellbinding pull of his dark eyes as he had seen them for the first time beneath that same tree. Eyes that made him feel small. He pulled Taki closer and kissed his lips.

Taki leaned into the kiss with a small sigh. Klaus’ tongue was warm. His broad lips were familiar, as was the way they moved and pressed with gentle pressure against Taki’s. Familiarity that was new. Each time, the very fact that Klaus' touch and taste was familiar would briefly leave Taki winded. It was a paradox, he realised, that would recur for the rest of his life.

Afterwards, he tried to break away from Klaus’ simmering golden gaze to cast a quick glance over his body. Klaus' shirt was open at the top few buttons so Taki glimpsed some of the gauze bandages on his chest.

‘The doctor said you needed bedrest,’ Taki tried, already knowing his words were futile.

A wide, tired smile.

‘This counts, right? I’ve barely moved from here for hours.’

_And then your sisters dive-bombed me._

He saw the way Taki’s eyes lingered on his left cheek.

‘How’s it looking?’ he asked.

Taki softly brushed his thumb along the bottom of the cut where it began, an inch away from the corner of Klaus’ mouth, all the way up to his temple.

‘It’s starting to scar over.’

Only a faint breeze whispered between the trees. Summer had shed its oppressive skin for a day and sunlight fell in dappled patches through the canopy, glistening on the ground like gold coins. Taki’s hair lifted and fell only in small gusts.

Klaus was surprised and happy to note that Taki seemed present for the first time in a week, as though he had finally stepped through the cloud that had shrouded him. Wherever he had been for the past week – the past few months, really – he was back.

Well overdue for his dose of painkillers, Klaus felt the pain beginning to grow in gradually stronger waves. The shrapnel wound beneath his collarbone was especially vindictive. But he would withstand it and more if it meant he was able to enjoy that moment for longer.

‘I'm sorry for not being able to see you that often while you were recovering,’ Taki said slowly. He tried to feel his way into the conversation he had been gearing up for. ‘I just didn't have the time. But now –’

The fact that Taki was there and apologising to him again made Klaus want to reassure him.

‘It's alright.’

He touched Taki's jaw again and brushed his fingers through his silky, heavy hair. He thought of how close he had been to losing him. If the train had been any closer...

He had known, in his bones, that the explosion had killed Taki. To that day, he fought to understand why that certainty had consumed him for those few harrowing minutes in a Eurotean hospital.

But Taki was here now. And whether or not Klaus would ever have all of him, he was determined to cherish whatever Taki could give him. It was a decision - a compromise - he had made months ago the west and it seemed all the more urgent now. He suddenly needed Taki to know it, even if it came out sounding strange and over-earnest.

_Maybe what you have is real happiness and you’re just not seeing it._

‘It’s alright, really,’ he repeated when it looked like Taki was about to say something else. He held Taki's face more firmly in his hand.

‘Klaus –’

‘No, wait. I'm sorry if I made you feel guilty in the hospital. I know things will always come up that are more important than me. I know that I'll never –’

_I'll never get as close to you as Hans did. I’ll never be patient enough. Observant enough. Good enough. Not enough for you to say those words and mean them._

‘I know I'll never be... be enough. But –’ and he gave a self-deprecating smile, one that folded his scar into a small lightning strike near his eye. ‘But as long as I can call you Master, and have you like this, I'll be happy. So don't worry about me so much, okay? I'll –’

But he stopped because the look on Taki's face was one of surprise. Almost dismay.

‘Taki?’

_I know I'll never be enough._

The words had been uttered so carelessly that Taki could easily have missed them.

‘Of course you're enough,’ Taki said, his voice strained. ‘You – you're everything.’

Klaus' heart stopped.

‘Klaus, you...’ Taki stammered, his cheeks steadily turning red again.

Though he knew his distance and his distractions had always been visible to Klaus, no less so since they returned from their time in the west, he had no idea that Klaus would have ever doubled back on himself and taken the blame for it.

‘You're the reason – you're the only...’

Taki’s feelings tumbled over themselves. After almost two years, he couldn't possibly coin everything together for Klaus in a way that did justice to how he felt. Or the fact that thoughts of Klaus had fuelled every one of his actions over the past week.

On top of that he saw that, for whatever reason, his inane stuttering had caused Klaus to blush in his turn.

Klaus felt his diaphragm grazing somewhat painfully against the insipid flecks of wounds on his chest. Those few words, so sudden and unexpected, had floored him and left both his lungs and heartbeat in a worse state.

And he had, of all things, blushed. He could feel it and he knew Taki could see it. He berated himself furiously.

That’s _how you react? After waiting for so long to hear him say something like that –_

And suddenly Taki had turned away and gotten to his feet. He took a few steps towards the wisteria.

Klaus barely had time to regret his silence – for failing to seize the moment and pull Taki close – before Taki began speaking again.

‘I –’ Taki said, his ears still red. ‘There's something I need to tell – to ask you.’

_We know a secret you don't know!_

Klaus held his breath.

Taki stared for a moment at the violet arms of flowers moving lazily in the breeze, as though they were idle fingers feeling out a beat or melody that no one could hear.

He turned to face Klaus, relieved that he was standing and Klaus was sitting, and relieved that there was some distance between them. Perhaps, gods willing, it would help him get through it.

‘Before Roskilde,’ he began uncertainly. ‘When I was in the west. I… I stopped by the cottage.’

Klaus blinked and stared for several seconds.

‘Why?’

_And why didn’t you tell me?_

‘I just – I wanted to see it,’ Taki replied, his voice again sounding laboured. ‘I was really… quite upset when you told me they sold it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I just wanted to see it again.’

Klaus couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. And seeing; the light dusting of red on Taki’s cheeks had deepened and his eyebrows were drawn, as though each of his words was being wrenched out. He didn’t once meet Klaus’ eye.

‘I was there, and then…’

* * *

Taki stood on the edge of the field, staring at the short wooden gate and the shingles that Klaus himself had replaced months earlier. Klaus’ singing voice came to him, strong and clear, between the dings of his hammer.

‘Taki-sama,’ Hasebe had said uncomfortably, waiting by the car. ‘We have to go. The train leaves soon.’

Taki had torn himself away, again feeling like a child.

But right before he got into the car, he suddenly stopped. Behind him, Hasebe faltered.

And then Taki turned back.

‘Taki-sama?’

Before he knew it, he was striding down the winding dirt road between the tall stalks of wheat. He swung the short wooden gate open and rapped on the door, his heart in his mouth.

It was opened by a stranger with dark hair brushed grey at the temples. Someone who didn’t at all expect to see a foreigner standing on his porch wearing a long jade military coat.

‘Yes?’ he said.

Hasebe waited tensely by the car for almost twenty minutes. Any longer and they would almost certainly miss their train.

Rikard Svendt and his wife Elise didn’t know what to make of it at first. They sat across the kitchen table from the young foreigner who spoke their language so fluently and whose eyes were startlingly intense. They had grown quite fond of the land in the few weeks they had lived on it.

But Taki had offered them almost three times what the property was worth. And they knew they would be fools to reject an offer like that.

When Taki finally returned and climbed into the car, he didn’t offer a single word of explanation and Hasebe didn’t ask.

* * *

Klaus stared.

‘You bought it?’

‘Yes,’ said Taki nervously. ‘As of last week it's under my name. But I want you to – it's yours. If you want it.’

There was silence as Klaus tried to process.

‘You bought my cottage back for me?’

‘Yes.’

Klaus was speechless. He was on the point of thanking him but he was held back by the glaring problem of not being able to do much about his cottage and farm when he was thousands of miles away.

Taki's gaze was on the grass before his feet. His hands had subconsciously curled in on themselves again. Klaus sensed he was getting closer to the reason behind everything.

The wound beneath his collarbone sent a spiteful flare of pain through his body. He ignored it.

‘And if... if it's something you want too,’ Taki said, so quietly that Klaus could only just hear him over the breeze. ‘I was hop – wondering – whether you wanted to go there. To live.’

There was a small pause. Taki's face was flushed and pained.

‘With me.’

Silence fell.

Klaus stared again, still not comprehending. The wisteria rustled patiently.

_Only the dead see the end of war._

They ended one after it started. They were trying, now, to stop one before it started. But in some way, if they stayed there and adhered to duty, they would always be fighting.

Taki had always accepted it as his fate. One that he didn’t have a hand in writing. But now...

‘I don’t –’ Klaus stammered, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘For – for how long?’

Taki finally looked at him. And the answer was there in his eyes.

_For good.  
_

* * *

Six months ago, in a large walk-in storage room that had been turned into a private holding cell, Taki Reizen was the first to discover Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde’s gift.

And Hans had seen Taki’s secret wish, nebulous and unformed though it was, even before Taki had seen the golden fields with his own eyes.

They spoke of a great many things that night. And in the end, Hans had carefully phrased one thing that he suspected would come back to Taki in a crucial moment of his life.

_Only you can resolve it, Taki-sama. You’re in a truly unique position. In history. In politics. Even in your family. Whether in your role as commander or political leader, whether in this past war or the next, whatever course of action you take will be the first of its kind._

Those words came back to Taki when he gave up the Imperial Throne for Klaus.

And they came to him again when he gave up everything else.

* * *

Meiji had been unable to stop smiling at the complex blend of emotions on the young prince’s face.

‘I know it’s not the right time to leave everything behind,’ Taki said falteringly.

‘There will never be a right time, Taki. Not for something like this.’

They had moved from the Throne Room to Meiji’s private quarters again and Meiji had asked his attendants and guards alike to leave them in peace.

‘And in fact, as far as timing goes, you’ve done quite well. While Roskilde is still fresh in our minds, the arms race will be stalled for a good long while. Plus, at home, the shoguns no longer have a great deal of responsibility.’

‘I’ve asked Ayabe if one of his nephews would be willing to shoulder some of my duties until Your Majesty elects a new shogun.’

‘Ayabe is a little distrustful of his luck,’ Meiji commented. ‘For his family to be able to claim any rights to your historic province is quite something.’

Taki wasn’t overly surprised that Ayabe had come to the emperor with the news.

‘What about your family?’ Meiji inquired.

‘I’ve left almost all of my inheritance to my sisters and Sumi, their birth mother.’

‘And they all know of your intentions?’

‘Yes.’

‘It appears you’ve thought it all out carefully. Not that I would have expected anything less from you.’

‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ Taki said, though something in the emperor’s tone made him nervous.

‘So,’ Meiji said, his eyes never leaving Taki’s face. ‘You’ve come to ask permission to cast aside the duty that the gods have bestowed upon you since time immemorial.’

Taki lowered his gaze to the floor. He had tried, over the past week, to avoid thinking in such terms as much as he could. But hearing them so bluntly, from the emperor no less, made it impossible for him to avoid it any longer.

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ 

In the long, painful silence that followed, Taki strained his ears for a noise of some kind. An unhappy sigh or an unkind tone that would deftly put an end to everything.

‘It sounds,’ Meiji said at length, ‘like a question between you and the gods.’

‘My sister, Yura, has been a priestess for over a year. I’ve asked her to consult the gods on my behalf.’

‘And the results, I imagine, came back in your favour?’

Taki wondered if Meiji sounded, almost, amused.

‘She – she assures me that the decision rests with me. And with you, as the Son of Heaven.’

‘Let me be clear,’ Meiji continued slowly. ‘You are asking to cast off your divinity. Your role as an _akitsumikami._ That is not something that can be so easily done with a simple nod from me. Your people will always think of you as a deity in human form.’

‘I know,’ Taki said. ‘But maybe, in time, my people will turn to others for guidance in the same way they once looked to me. Maybe others who are… better suited to the role than I have been.’

‘What makes you think that you, of all people, have been unworthy?’

Taki tried to ignore the heat that crept up his neck. He wondered how close he might come to a confession without endangering himself.

‘There are some things – some vows – I have not entirely –’

At this, Meiji’s smile widened.

‘Taki, if you think you are the only deviant in this room, you are sorely mistaken.’

Taki’s lifted his head in surprise. Meiji’s gaze remained impenetrable.

‘Despite having that in common, it appears you and I are at opposite crossroads. I shirked my duties and broke my vows for long enough in my youth. It is high time for me to step into the role which, up until now, I have rather masterfully avoided.’

The serene yet deeply humorous tone, even more than the unexpected news, once again left Taki wondering how on Earth to reply.

He tried to wrap his head around the startling fact of, not only Meiji’s confession, but the liberal way in which it was delivered. His envy of Meiji appeared again in a different form.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said before he could stop himself, ‘may I ask you a personal question?’

Meiji’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

‘You may.’

Taki wondered how best to phrase his obscure new thoughts.

‘You and I had the same upbringing. We were taught the same things and we bore the same... the same burdens. Your Majesty has been an _akitsumikami_ for longer than I have.’ Taki paused as though unsure how much further he could go. ‘And yet you… we’re so –’

‘Different?’

Taki fell silent.

‘And you’re wondering why that might be?’

A meek nod, eyes averted once more.

Meiji took a moment to consider it.

‘I have wondered the same thing in different forms over the years,’ he said. ‘Why some of us are willingly tied down by fate and circumstance, almost without question, and why some others are so strongly inclined to resist. At first I thought it was a matter of choice. But I suspect it’s even simpler than that. I believe there are some things that are so inherent to our natures that it is impossible to change them, no matter what the circumstances.’

If that were really the case Taki wondered what it meant for him, and Klaus. Perhaps this was something that would, in time, prove to be a mistake. Perhaps, no matter what he did, he would always be bound to his duty. Perhaps this was even Meiji’s roundabout way of denying him permission to cast everything aside so suddenly and recklessly.

Meiji looked at the expression on Taki’s face and realised that, for the first time in the long years he had known him, Taki was showing his age. His vulnerability was endearing.

‘Then again,’ Meiji said slyly. ‘There are some things that I believe are entirely in our power to choose.’

He adjusted his headdress slightly with a long, slender hand while Taki turned his questioning gaze to him.

‘As I mentioned earlier, you and I are on opposite crossroads. It’s time for me to step into my role. And, if you so choose, it’s time for you to step down from yours. A role, I might add, that you have been more than worthy of, and one you have fulfilled beyond the expectations of men and gods alike.’

Something small began welling in the pit of Taki’s stomach. For a split second, Meiji’s words and the warmth of his tone almost moved him to tears.

‘You won a war for your country, Taki. You’ve risked everything, time and time again. You’ve done enough.’ After a beat, he added, ‘You both have.’

A few hours away, in the Reizen residence, Klaus’ eyelids twitched and he awoke with a long sigh. Lying still on his back, he breathed in the soft summer air and somehow sensed that Taki wasn’t home yet.

‘Some of us,’ Meiji finished gently, ‘deserve to fly away and forget it all.’

It had started as a small surge of emotion but it had grown enough in the space of a few seconds that it now threatened to overwhelm Taki.

He was caught somewhere between propriety and soul-deep gratitude and sensed that his powers of expression were no match for it.

‘Your Majesty…’

Meiji saw him struggling and came to his aid.

‘If you’re worried about how much power you’re leaving in my hands, allow me to assure you. I have one Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt’s confidence in my leadership, something which played a small part in my having the throne in the first place. That’s all the faith I need in my own ability to govern.’

Despite himself, Taki felt a smile cross his face. He was struck by the emperor’s careless good humour in person and his tenacity and serenity as a leader. They were both true of Meiji.

It made Taki wonder about himself. Who he was in the east as opposed to who he had been, for two precious months, in the west. They were both who he was.

But only one of them had been truly happy.

‘If I need you at any point during my reign, Taki, I’ll send for you.’

Meiji's mysterious, feline smile was something Taki would always remember.

‘But I probably won't.’

* * *

After Taki left, the emperor took his time returning to the Throne Room, pausing for a moment on the small arched bridge. Standing out against the red canopy of the maple trees on a nearby shore, he saw a tall white bird ruffle its feathers in the process of grooming.

 _What I wouldn’t give,_ Meiji thought, _to see Klaus' reaction.  
_

* * *

Eleven years after they first met under the wisteria tree, on a summer day that was not unlike the first one, Taki and Klaus faced one another once more and the young master awaited his knight’s response.

But the silence stretched on for so long that an entirely new sort of anxiety was beginning to bubble up in Taki’s chest.

Klaus only stared, with an absent hand on his solar plexus, trying half-heartedly to quell the pain of his wounds.

‘It was... it was your idea. Initially,’ Taki said, his voice still stiff and his face still deeply flushed. ‘In Luckenwalde, when we were under the laburnums.’

_Taki. What if you came with me to my country?_

‘And the two months we spent there were... were wonderful. And so I thought...’

Reeling.

Klaus’ mind was reeling.

Flinging from one memory to another, from one sensation to the other, anchored by the ever-growing physical pain that wanted him to lie still and not move for hours and anchored by the sight of Taki standing before the swaying arms of wisteria, giving himself to Klaus in a few simple words.

He still hadn’t said a thing.

Taki flailed, feeling more lost by the second. He found himself trying to guess what Klaus was thinking.

‘You – you were right about something you said before. If we stay here, there will always be something. But if we leave, if I really leave it all behind, like this, then there’s a chance that we’ll able to…’

Klaus' silence made Taki crumble. Taki suddenly realised he deserved it for his silences over the past few weeks. And the months and years before that.

Taki had had to make sure first, before he asked Klaus, that such a thing was even possible. He didn’t think either of them could bear a letdown of such magnitude. But now, it occurred to him how foolish it was not to have asked Klaus first.

Perhaps he had misjudged and misinterpreted and misfired from the start. Perhaps it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Klaus may not see the point of something so drastic and irrevocable. He had been away from home long enough that a gesture like this would be hollow and almost embarrassing. A spoilt prince trying to measure up to something Klaus had done without breaking a sweat almost two years ago.

In just a few minutes, his wasted efforts lay piled at his feet – his useless absences from Klaus’ bedside when he needed him most, his long nights lying awake grappling with the weight of love and loyalty and duty, the unanswered questions he sent to gods and ancestors, the nerve-wracking and often surreal conversations he had with Ogura and all his household staff, with Ayabe and each of the shoguns, with Hebe, with Midori and Chiyeko, with Sumi, with Yura, with Douman, with Emperor Meiji.

It had all come apart in the face of Klaus’ silence and his steady, stunned gaze.

* * *

_Taki. What if you came with me to my country?_

_I’m the second son so I don’t own any land, but I have a small house. And a rose garden my sister left behind. The white roses are exquisite in the rainy season._

_Come on, it’ll work out somehow._

_Doing whatever needs to be done, earning your daily bread._

_I don’t think it’s such a bad life._

* * *

Taki wanted, suddenly, to be far away. To curl up under his sheets and bury himself in his humiliation like he had done on his first day at Luckenwalde.

‘I'm sorry,’ he heard himself say. ‘I'm sorry. Forget that I –’

And suddenly Klaus had slowly gotten to his feet, his hand still pressing hard in the middle of his chest. Before Taki could stop him, Klaus was kneeling at his feet.

‘Klaus, you're not well enough to –’

And the tears poured from Klaus’ face onto the hem of Taki's coat which he held in his hand.

Taki inhaled sharply.

‘Klaus!’

He realised in that moment of numb shock that he had never seen Klaus cry. A vague memory of tears came to him from a time when he was near unconsciousness and holding onto Klaus atop his bike in No Man’s Land. It was faint enough to be a dream.

This was real. This was immediately in front of him, in the form of Klaus’ hunched body and the tears that flowed without restraint. Taki’s throat closed in sorrow when he heard Klaus’ voice emerge in staggered breaths.

He still hadn’t said a word.

‘I’m sorry,’ Taki said again, distraught and confused. ‘Klaus, please –’

And then Klaus, tears still coursing, had swept him up off the grass.

Taki's shock and guilt at having made him cry was lost in the kiss and, when he was held aloft in Klaus' arms, in the fact that he was suddenly nine years old again, asking a stranger from the west if he would be his knight.


	37. The Other Side of the Sky I

_SEVEN YEARS LATER_

After traversing east and west, after reaching the ends of the Earth and back, after years of falling apart and coming back together, they found themselves alone, once again, in a little clearing in the west.

The sky was a swathe of violet and pink, with scorch marks of orange where the sun was sinking. Nearby, a tiny creek sang merrily as it hopped from stone to stone, replenishing the moss and making its way downhill to where a waterfall coursed into the mouth of a river.

A doe grazed by the tree line, paying no mind to the pair who rested in the middle of the clearing only a stone’s throw away. They had been coming for years and she knew they meant her no harm.

Taki breathed in deep, awake but with his eyes still closed, feeling the comfort of the weight pressing gently on his stomach. He felt the wolf’s steady breath against his hand. He heard the soft thud of its tail against the grass as it lifted once and dropped. He ran his hand over the wolf’s fur without any fear. He imagined the burning gold of its eyes.

Afterwards, the wolf stirred and awoke. They stood up again. They walked once more. They walked until west became east and they were roaming among the gods.

They reached their tree. Taki crouched beside the wolf as they looked out across as the carnage. The flames that would soon reach them. He glanced down at his companion and wondered in how many ways they would meet again.

And suddenly, he saw.

He saw them in all of their lives. In all of their pairings.

In one – a life not far from theirs – the wolf was a man. Almost a man. The creature was half wolf and half man and in his arms he held a woman whose body was peppered with arrows. Whose life had been drained before her lover’s eyes. Taki felt the agony of the wolf’s howl stronger than the life-ending pain of arrows in his, in her, own body.[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-14-15.html/45/)

Time and time again, they would meet. In each life they met. And in each life they were torn apart far too soon.

Ahead of Taki, the fire approached at startling speed. The wolf began its low growl.

And then Taki saw them as they would be finally. In a time he couldn’t fathom but in a place that was familiar. There was the wisteria tree and, far away, the small creek threading through a vibrant, silent green clearing. There was still carnage and chaos. But amidst all of that, they had carved something out for themselves.

A small pocket of peace.

A niche in the curse of their intertwined fate.

He crouched beside the wolf and felt its growl reverberate through his body. He felt its heat one last time.

 _In our final lives,_ he thought.

The wolf heard him and it turned its head, ears pricked forward.

_In our final lives, we’ll have the time together that we want. Before they tear us apart again._

Even as the fire was on the point of engulfing them, they stared it down as one.

* * *

It was the second time the dream had ever come to Taki.

He sat on the bench in the rose garden and mulled it over, alone in the deep indigo of midnight. In a stillness that was unique to the countryside. Spring was inching out of the west and a breeze that was slightly too cold brought the garden to life in short bursts.

The roses would be gone soon, Taki realised. The hedges would be bare. But for now they remained, lush and full and heavy, past their prime, whispering to one another with each gust of wind.

There was, however, something about the bareness of the garden in the autumn and winter months that Taki found rather beautiful. The promise of something new. The start of a new cycle.

A new cycle.

_In our final lives, we’ll have the time together that we want._

Despite the intervening seven years, Taki still vividly recalled the last time he had had that dream. It had also been in the west and its realisticness left a real impression on Taki then as it did now. It had all the qualities of a memory. And, like last time, it left him feeling unsettled.

So he had left Klaus sleeping soundly in bed and walked slowly down the short hallway into the kitchen. The faint scratching of the gramophone made him take a detour into the living room where the needle skipped mutely over an old record.

The memory from the previous evening made him smile. Klaus throwing on the record, pulling him away from the latest forecasts for autumn harvests, overwriting Taki’s protests with complaints that it had been years since Taki had indulged him in his whimsy. Their closeness in the living room had steadily escalated and they had forsaken the record in favour of the bedroom and never returned.

Taki lifted the needle and carefully replaced the old Reinhart number in its case. He then quietly slipped out the back door and into the rose garden.

The temperature gradually dropped. Taki had only wrapped a thin robe around himself before leaving the bedroom and the cold pressed easily on his limbs. He drew them closer together and thought almost wistfully about Klaus’ warmth he had left behind.

The dream left behind more details than it had last time. Taki vividly remembered waking in the clearing beside the wolf and even parts of their walk that had lasted years. He remembered the half-wolf creature who had held him as he lay dying.

He remembered his own final words. _Before they tear us apart again._

He sent a silent prayer to the gods asking for the wisdom to understand what it meant. Whether it was nothing more than his own paranoia. His sense that he didn’t deserve the peace and happiness that had enveloped him for seven long years.

It occurred to him that he should tell Klaus. He could already hear Klaus’ low, rumbling words that carried both empathy and derision; a precise balance of heresy that Taki had always found strangely comforting.

But he decided not to. He filed it away along with the other things, both small and large, that he hadn’t been able to tell Klaus over the years.

As though the thought had summoned him, footsteps approached softly through the grass, crunching a few dry leaves. Klaus appeared around the corner, his whole body from the neck down draped in the large diamond-patterned blanket from their bed.

Taki’s pulse surged for a brief moment. Even after years, it was a reaction he would have almost every time Klaus stepped into the same room.

‘Hey,’ Klaus said, his voice dragged down by sleep. ‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine, I just couldn’t sleep. You didn’t have to come out here.’

Klaus smirked and drew alongside the bench. Taki moved aside to give him room.

‘I see. Rendezvous with a secret lover?’

He sat and yawned, flexing his toes beneath the quilt.

‘I’ll leave before he gets here, if you like.’

Klaus unwrapped part of the blanket and draped his arm over Taki’s shoulders.

‘You must be freezing.’

Instinctively, Taki shifted closer.

‘I warn you, I’m still naked under here.’

He pulled Taki against his side and covered them both with the blanket. Taki slowly sank into Klaus’ musk and warmth and the faint lavender scent of the blanket.

‘It’s not Rudi, is it?’ Klaus said.

‘Who?’

‘The guy you snuck out here to see.’

Taki almost smiled. Klaus squeezed the side of Taki’s thigh and leaned into the smell of his hair. Whenever they were in the garden together, he could never be sure if he was smelling Taki or the flowers.

‘I mean, he's a tall, strapping lad. In his twenties now, isn't he? Pretty sure he's always been smitten with you. I get it if you want to trade me in for a younger model. ’

At thirty-three, Klaus jovially considered himself an old man; a complaint he voiced mostly to irritate Claudia. He also found it hard to fathom that Taki was now older than Klaus had been when they first met.

His gaze moved from the pale, porcelain skin of Taki’s face to the moonlight-dappled garden that surrounded them.

‘The roses came out nicely this year.’

Little heads of layered petals dipped in bashful acknowledgment.

'They did.'

‘Shame they'll fly off soon.’

Words that echoed Taki’s own thoughts from earlier.

A new cycle, Taki thought as his head almost automatically sought out the grove between Klaus’ neck and shoulder. In each life they met. And in each life –

‘So how come you couldn’t sleep?’ Klaus asked.

Taki hesitated.

For a while, there was only silence and the quiet rustling of the hedges.

‘Taki?’

* * *

_SEVEN YEARS EARLIER_

After Taki made his broken, stuttered proposal beneath the wisteria, it took Klaus another day to see clearly past the numbing mist that had filled his mind. He spent most of it in bed, resting and taking medication under Taki’s strict vigil.

Afterwards, when Klaus had made a full recovery, he found that Taki had arranged everything so carefully and meticulously that there wasn’t much left for Klaus to do besides pack what few possessions he had.

It didn’t feel real. It wouldn’t feel real for a very long time. He felt as though he had stepped into a conspiracy of some kind, a particularly cruel one devised by the gods, where the entire world had banded together in order to give him the one thing he wanted more than anything else only to have it taken away by some sleight of hand.

With no idea how to come to terms with it – with joy tempered by equal amounts of denial and paranoia – he simply packed.

Their delay of a few days, in fact, owed to Klaus a great deal more than Taki. He asked for it under the guise of his desire for Taki to spend as much time with his sisters as possible.

While this was true, he was also waiting for Taki to take those few days to change his mind. To approach Klaus quietly and tell him perhaps he had acted too rashly in the wake of Roskilde and Eurote.

But Taki never did. Over those few days, he and Klaus would spend time with the girls and Taki’s small smile, on the rare occasion that Klaus saw it, was as calm and measured as ever.

Most of their time was spent outdoors in the Reizen grounds. Yura, who had left her duties at the temple for a short time, would sit serenely on the blanket that Douman spread for her. He then awkwardly situated himself nearby and hoped that he would soon stop blushing. They would watch as Klaus crouched behind bushes or flattened himself against tree trunks to avoid his two young pursuers, who would squeal and shriek with glee when they found him. Laughter like bells.

Taki and Hebe would slowly walk with Sumi to the lake and back, sometimes passing near the antics of the younger daughters and their guardian spirit. Klaus would flash Taki a wide grin whenever he caught his eye.

‘He smiles a lot,’ Sumi observed when they reached the top of the slope and settled on the blanket beside Yura and Douman.

‘And he can sing!’ Hebe piped up. ‘I heard him singing a song in his own language yesterday.’

Taki remained silent but his heart lifted. Klaus singing was certainly a good sign.

* * *

During their last few nights in the east, Klaus would lie awake holding Taki, his mind still caught in a strange limbo. He would conduct lengthy discussions with Taki in his own mind.

_I can’t ask you to do this._

_You didn’t ask me to,_ came the reply in Taki’s voice while the real Taki slept beside him.

_You can’t leave your sisters behind like this._

_They’re in good hands._

Yura. Douman, who was so unlike his father. The kindly gaze of the girls’ birth mother, Sumi, who reminded Klaus quite distinctly of their old housekeeper, Anna.

 _What about your people?_  Klaus asked him. _Your country?_  

_They’re in even better hands._

Meiji. To whom Taki had spoken before he came to Klaus. Meiji, who had risen from the pain of his past to shoulder the responsibilities of an entire nation. And who had, in a small way, absolved Klaus and Taki of something which men and gods alike considered a sin.

 _I would have been happy here,_ Klaus told him silently. _I would have been happy here with you. It would have been enough. I told you so many times. You didn’t have to do this for me._

 _Something would always come up,_ Taki answered. _For as long as we’re here, my duty will always find me. We’ll always be fighting, in one way or another. I want to leave it all behind. I’ve always wanted to. A part of me has always been searching for something, just like you. I think it was what drove me to Luckenwalde in the first place. A part of me has always, always wanted to. I’ve just never been able to tell you._

Klaus’s arm stretched out almost to the edge of the bed. Taki slept with his head resting comfortably on Klaus’ bicep. Klaus felt his gentle breaths on his skin.

He then asked Taki a question formed out of pieces that had been lingering in the corners of his mind.

_Will it be enough? Just you and me?_

Taki took a slow, deep breath and shifted in Klaus’ arms.

_Will I be enough?_

There was an even deeper silence in the midst of their silent conversation.

 _Of course you will,_ came Taki’s reply. _You’re everything._

Klaus’ jaw twitched. He wondered if he was on the point of tears again, one which this time, ridiculously enough, owed to an imagined conversation. Imagined, he thought, but which had tentatively borrowed from the words Taki had said to him beneath the wisteria.

 _I love you,_ Klaus said. _So much I can barely stand it sometimes._

The Taki in his head remained as silent as the one sleeping beside him. Klaus pulled him closer and pressed his forehead to Taki’s temple.

During his waking hours, Klaus would try to bring the conversation up – to hear Taki respond in the real world. But he couldn’t do it. Whether because of an irrational fear that simply asking might, even in the slightest, inspire a change of heart, or because Taki’s response might somehow exacerbate his guilt, or for a million other reasons he couldn’t identify, Klaus couldn’t ask him whether he was sure he was doing the right thing.

And so, Klaus for the first time understood Taki’s silent burden over the years. He understood the crushing guilt and gratitude of being the one for whom so much had been given up.

_Of course it was for you._

The certainty of Claudia’s voice, the prescience of it, came to him from across the intervening months.

 _How wonderful,_ she had said. _That he should love you so much._

* * *

When the day arrived, the Reizen daughters, from Yura down to Midori, were pictures of bittersweet grief. Well-wishes abounded along with promises of visits to the west as soon as the train line was rebuilt.

Taki had also spent part of that morning with Azusa and Date. (Moriya sent his regards from Eurote where he had been posted by Meiji as part of the Nuclear Committee.) Klaus was fascinated to see the three of them interacting outside the pressures of war. He could almost picture their childhoods spent together on those very grounds.

Even Hasebe and Uemura had arrived, to Taki’s surprise and slight embarrassment. Though they claimed to bring news and regards from Meiji and others in the capital, Klaus suspected, from their even stiffer-than-usual expressions and the fact that they were dressed to the nines with rows of pins and badges adorning their uniforms, that they simply wished to see their commander off.

He almost expected Haruki and Ryoumei to come careening around the corner, flushed and out of breath. But the surprises ended with the Grand Chamberlain, at whom Klaus threw a wink designed to aggravate, and with the Major, at whom Klaus directed a final and sincere apology which was received, as he expected, with the gracious but awkward civility unique to his people.

Then Taki climbed into the backseat of the car beside Klaus.

And they, simply, left.

* * *

After they arrived, it took Klaus just over a week to realise that he was trying to hang onto the guilt – as repentance or as a safeguard or perhaps, more irrationally, as a self-imposed barrier to the kind of peace he didn’t think he deserved.

Taki noticed and it made him nervous in his turn.

In the first week, Klaus’ feet weren’t quite yet on the ground, metaphorically. Physically, this managed to make him somewhat gauche and ungainly. He would bump into Taki as they moved about in the kitchen or when they passed one another down the short hallway. He would sometimes stutter an apology that made Taki blink and flush and realise they had stumbled into a strange domestic embarrassment. It was almost as though, after two years, they had somehow come full circle and found themselves back in their first few days as awkward roommates at Luckenwalde.

Even at night, when Klaus kissed him and held him and moved inside him on the bed that had once been Claudia and Wilhelm’s, and his parents’ before that, he was far less vocal than usual and there was a curious silence that followed in the wake of heavy breathing.

By then, Taki, who had guessed the source of Klaus’ strange behaviour, had slowly begun to nurture a kind of patience that almost went as far as fond amusement.

He had long since come to terms with the decision he had made. But he guessed, rightly, that Klaus needed a little more time in order to catch up. And so at night he would let Klaus fold him into a tight embrace. And he waited.

Klaus, meanwhile, waited for it to all be whipped out from beneath him.

He never told Taki of the nightmares he had during those first few nights. He would wake in a thin sheen of sweat, having been shot down again over enemy lines. Falling and falling and falling. Crawling over miles and miles, over barren, broken land to the cottage where Claudia ran to him, tears already in her eyes.

Or he would wake from the moment Berkut looked him in the eye, raised the gun and fired into his chest.

Or he would see the faces of the men he had lost. Men he had been responsible for. Men he should have died with. A part of him had, in fact, died with them. And that part of him never deserved to come back to life.

But it did. It slowly flickered back to life when Taki arrived at Luckenwalde. When Klaus found he was able to feel something again – something close to happiness. It was enough for him to climb into the cockpit again with nothing but excitement in his chest. For him to lose even more men under his command with a hollowness that spoke of the brutality of war but one that, somehow, didn’t drag him down into the depths with them. Through it all, he remained upright and afloat because he had found… something.

And it was here now in his arms, lying asleep and dreaming and entirely his. In the home where he had grown up.

He didn’t deserve any of it, but it was here now.

Quite possibly, his ability to let it all sink in, that one definable moment when he felt his feet hit the ground, owed to a small ceramic vase engraved with a rose.

A little ways down the slope behind the cottage, past the rose garden and the washing line, Klaus' grandfather had built a small wooden shed to house his gardening utensils and equipment for the harvest.

Bit by bit, in a way that Klaus' grandmother fondly lamented, the shed's more useful purpose gave way to her husband's lifelong passion for ceramics; a passion second only to his love for his roses. The gardening and harvest equipment was relegated to a corner while the centre of the dusty workspace was devoted to a turning wheel, benches, an old kiln and pots of aging, unusable clay.

The walls were lined with shelves containing jars, vases and containers of all shapes and sizes, some in various stages of construction.

Klaus, who had brought Taki there to introduce him to the pieces of equipment they had on hand for the harvest, was surprised to hear that Taki knew how to use the turn wheel. Then, after a moment's introspection, he wasn't surprised at all.

'I guess the east would be nuts for that kind of thing, huh?' he observed, also remembering an old conviction that there was nothing in the world his prince couldn't do.

Seeing how Taki fondly ran his fingers over the wheel was enough for Klaus to bring back a vat of mouldable clay after his next trip to town. Taki was surprised at first but warmed to the idea soon enough.

That evening, a week after they first arrived, Klaus had finished making dinner and wondered what was keeping Taki. The bright yellow light of the shed stretched in a long slit across the grass. Inside, he found Taki in an apron, his arms covered in small splotches of hardening clay and his critical gaze on his first attempt which sat before him on the workbench. The kiln behind him was simmering down.

'Already done?' Klaus asked in surprise. Taki had only begun that afternoon.

Taki was unhappy with the slightly uneven base of the vase, which he could see if he stared straight into it. Besides that, he had envisioned a broader gourd shape but the spinning clay had moulded itself into something more slender than he intended. The fluted neck and wide mouth, however, were more or less what he had in mind.

He had also been disappointed to find that the shed didn't contain any painting or glazing supplies. Klaus' grandfather had opted for sturdy, heavy pieces that retained their original colour. Taki recalled from his youth, under the discerning eye of his sensei, the simple joy of choosing colours and breathing life into something that had started off so shapeless and empty.

Without the supplies, he had improvised with the vase while it was still wet. Using a scalpel he had etched a complex, layered rose onto the vase's lower curved half, decorated with delicate spirals and curves reaching out towards the thinning neck.

As it was, uncoloured but etched and finished, he passed it doubtfully to Klaus.

Klaus held it and turned it over carefully, running his fingertips through the sharp grooves of the flower. It was small and delicate, especially compared to the hefty pots and jugs lining the room. It was just large enough to hold a few stems.

But it was exquisite.

'Was this really your first try on that wheel?'

'Yes.'

The vase seemed a lot smaller in Klaus' hands. Taki's self-consciousness went up a few notches.

'I'm a little rusty,' he said hesitantly. 'And there wasn't any paint, so I couldn't –'

'I love it,' said Klaus, his voice flat, as though he were stating an axiom. 'It's never leaving the kitchen table.'

And when this typically overzealous praise made Taki's cheeks colour a little, when he glanced at the floor and his lips twitched, it came to Klaus properly for the first time.

Perhaps it was because the clay-splotched Taki was so unlike Taki the commander and prince and more like Taki as he had been in Luckenwalde, when the two of them had grown close enough to become friends. When Klaus had cooked for him and watched him eat, or when he listened to Taki talking about his sisters for the first time.

So, in that unlikely moment, it finally sank in that it was real. It had happened. He was with Taki, and Taki had brought him home.

He took a step towards Taki and kissed him, somehow tasting wheat and clay and dust and roses all at once. Caught off guard, Taki didn't get a chance to return the kiss before Klaus, in a few swift moves, placed the vase on one of the stools and pulled his body in close.

'I'm...' Taki tried breathily during the few seconds he was able to surface. 'I'm covered in...'

But he recognised the change that had come over Klaus and knew excuses like those wouldn't make a shred of difference.

Klaus pushed him backwards onto the work table and the pottery wheel clattered to the floor.

And when Taki realised that his Klaus, his wolf, had finally surfaced after a week of inertia, he was surprised at how relieved he was.

* * *

Pottery. Etiquette. History. Art. Duty and purity. They made up a younger Taki's world. They enveloped him every bit as tangibly as the robes that his attendants helped him slip into every morning. They would even peter into his happy interludes with Azusa, Date and Moriya; childhood companions who were still separated from the young prince by barriers they could sense but couldn't name.

And now, when Taki was wrist-deep in soil in the vegetable patch or learning from Klaus how to hand-pick wheat, he remembered his spiritual teachings. Lessons about harmony. Balance. The mindful middle path that avoided the extremes of both hedonism and deprivation.

Wasn't that his life now? Didn't it make the most sense here, where he felt as though the world had stopped its relentless hurtling and had finally come to rest?

He held the potato bulb in his hand, cut in half as Klaus instructed, and imagined it slumbering in the soil, unmoving and yet sprouting at the same time. The simple thought left him with a strange feeling. As though this was what his teachings had been trying to get across to him all along.

Lessons about balance, however, would almost immediately blend into those about honour. Ancestors and duty and obligation. Vows. Taki had absorbed them with the same vigour as those about harmony.

But Klaus gradually, inadvertently, had made him question those teachings in particular, beginning as far back as Luckenwalde. Enough that, after years of confliction, he found they were things he could simply, if hesitantly, take off. Like the clothes Klaus peeled off him at night.

Leaving it all behind had almost been easy. But he could never be sure if the gods had forgiven him. Months ago, after the knighthood ceremony, under the wisteria, Klaus had offered Taki his own brash theory: they had. Surely they had. And Klaus had sworn to protect Taki from any god who might be keeping score and planning to come for him.

He glanced at Klaus across the field where he stretched his arms luxuriously over his head before continuing to work. The heretical thought occurred to Taki that perhaps Klaus could. And that, perhaps, he already had.

* * *

_TWO MONTHS LATER_

Taki awoke shortly after dawn when the smell of a new day was still being made outside, being delivered to him in gentle waves. Before he had a chance to properly open his eyes, a large arm reached for him and dragged him across the mattress, holding him fast against a huge, warm body.

‘Klaus?’

But Klaus kept snoring.

Taki almost smiled at the strength of him; strength even in sleep. He looked down at the hand on his chest which had loosened its hold since it pulled him close. He carefully picked it up and held it up to the weak light of dawn.

He spent the next few idle seconds in his state of half-sleep examining the hand that was the size of a dinner plate. Though he would never admit it in a thousand years, it was those hands that had most intrigued him about Klaus, physically, in Luckenwalde. Taki had often cast furtive looks at the size and shape of them, how they held textbooks or closed around the handle of his bag, how they would rest like live creatures on his chest when he was lying on his back, telling a story. How they were cumbersome but surprisingly swift and graceful in their actions. Those thoughts had, of course, been laden with a brand new, consuming sort of shame and disgust.

Now he inspected the hand freely. He stroked it and turned it over. He observed the size of each finger, the way the knuckles were slightly, and somehow charmingly, wider than the fingers themselves. The toughness of the palm. The light golden hairs on the back. When it was a sleeping giant like that, it was hard to believe all the things it had done to him.

‘You know,’ a voice rumbled behind Taki, making him jump. ‘If you like it so much I can cut it off for you.’

Turning slowly, he met Klaus’ sleepy, amused gaze between the hairs that had fallen typically low over his forehead. Taki's eyes roamed over the golden, diagonal slash on his cheek and reached out to brush the hair back from his eyes. He then gently ran his fingers over Klaus' lips.

Over the past few months, it had been happening more and more. At first, Klaus had borne it with breath-held, anxious patience, again feeling like the hunter whose one wrong move might make him bolt. Now he sank into it. His new reality.

He buried his face between Taki’s pillow and the back of his neck near his shoulder.

‘You always smell so damn good here in the morning.’

He tilted his head slightly into Taki’s neck and kissed it while running his hand over Taki's chest and up to his jaw, his thumb parting Taki’s lips.

Taki’s breathing alerted him to what might be happening further south. He slid his hand back down over Taki’s chest and taut stomach and held his cock firmly, prompting a small moan. Before Taki was submerged in the sensation, he felt about for Klaus’ and found it. He felt it stiffen under his touch and Klaus breathed more urgently onto his skin.

For a few minutes their hands worked slowly but steadily, drawing out the pleasure. They both breathed heavily, Klaus’s face still firmly wedged against Taki’s neck where he would occasionally plant small kisses or pull at Taki's earlobe.

An idea slowly took shape in the back of Klaus' mind. With each stroke from Taki's hand, and each little sound that escaped Taki's lips, the image began to gather momentum. And suddenly, Klaus' need to see it had taken over.

He kissed Taki's neck and swiftly rolled them over so Taki was on top. He then drew back a bit.

'I want to try something,' he said.

Taki tried to look at him through eyes that were misted over. His pupils were blown wide, Klaus thought, his cock stiffening even more.

'Sit up.'

The way he said it – a tone that was somewhere between being commanding and coaxing – made Taki's body flush with anticipation. He pushed against Klaus' chest and sat up.

'Turn around.'

Blinking a few times, Taki nervously obeyed. As he tried to reposition himself over Klaus' body, he felt Klaus grab hold of his hips and pull him up until his lower half was spread wide and hovering above Klaus' face. The sudden shift in position made Taki gasp and almost fall face-first onto Klaus' thigh. Klaus' cock, stiff and slick, was right beside his cheek.

'Suck it.'

There was nothing at all coaxing about that command. Lust raced through Taki in a powerful wave, both from the raspiness of Klaus' voice and the feeling of being so exposed. He lifted Klaus' cock carefully and his lips met his hand halfway down the shaft.

Klaus groaned and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead.

The tip of Klaus' cock nudged against the back of Taki’s throat.

‘Fuck, yes,’ Klaus grunted.

As Taki slid his mouth over him, always meeting his hand around halfway, he considered taking Klaus all the way down his throat again; something which always required at least some forethought and focus. He was distracted, however, by the hand that was kneading his ass cheeks. And suddenly, Klaus’ finger had pushed in, deep, without any warning.

It surprised Taki enough that he bit down on Klaus’ cock near the tip.

Klaus gasped.

Taki pulled off to apologise in shock, and was both guilty and relieved to hear him laugh.

‘My own fault,’ Klaus conceded.

Without another word, he then tilted his chin up and swallowed Taki’s cock right to the base. Taki moaned and dropped his head on Klaus’ thigh. He felt Klaus’ tongue circle the tip of his dick before his mouth plunged over him again.

It took Taki a few seconds to remember where he was. With effort, he raised his head and took Klaus into his mouth once again.

They sucked in sync for long minutes, Klaus breaking off to thrust his tongue into Taki, occasionally alternating with his fingers as well, pushing in as deep as he liked from that angle. He felt the reverberations from Taki's moans on his own cock, loving the closed circle of it.

Taki then pulled off again, gasping, and warned him to stop or he would come.

Klaus took him far, all the way into his throat, at the same moment that he pushed three fingers in, angling them just right so they would brush his prostate hard. Klaus felt Taki’s cock shudder and release in his mouth.

It was an effortless transition from Taki’s cock to his ass, where Klaus pushed Taki’s own come inside him, massaging it in with his fingers, pulling the rim apart as wide as he could. Taki made soft sounds, his cheeks blazing, feeling entirely at Klaus' mercy.

Klaus then sat up so suddenly that Taki’s breath left him. His face was pressed down against the mattress by the footboard. He held his breath when Klaus’ cock nudged at his hole.

Changing his mind, realising suddenly that he hadn’t yet kissed him that morning, Klaus then flipped him over. Their eyes met for a few moments as he lowered his torso over Taki, arms on either side of his head, claiming him fully.

Taki’s eyes, blue-black and glossy, were still lost behind the cloud of his climax. His hair was everywhere. Klaus took his face in his hands and kissed him.

The room smelled of sandalwood and spring but Klaus, for one, could only smell one thing. His mouth never lifted from Taki's, even for a breather, as he lined himself up. His mouth covered Taki's completely even when he thrust in and Taki's long, desperate moan was muffled against his lips.

Taki's mind, meanwhile, on the way Klaus' huge hands were holding his own in an unyielding grip. He thought about how they had held textbooks and bags. Then how they had curled around the handle of a gun. How they plunged deep into fresh soil. And how they had held Taki's face as he kissed him.

* * *

_FOUR MONTHS LATER_

In a strange way, Taki was almost glad of the things that went wrong.

They grounded him. Reminded him that happiness wasn't an all-encompassing shroud. That it was, rather, a broad, white sheet that was settling over the world and showing protrusions where it landed. 

The worst of those protrusions took form six months after they arrived.

Taki walked down the dusty street towards the truck, his arms full of groceries. The night air had just turned cold and his first winter at the cottage was around the corner. He was anticipating the first snowfall and how the fields might look coated in white.

Around him, shops were closing down for the night. The warm lights spilling out of windows were put out one by one. Slowly. At an ambling pace, with an amiable _'Gute Nacht'_ punctuating the air every now and then.

Taki reached the truck, which he had parked on a side street, and fumbled through his pockets for his keys. Klaus was at home fighting a fever which he had made worse by refusing to acknowledge it as a fever in the first few days and continuing to work outside in the cold.

Thoughts of Klaus' sheepish grin, and specifically how his huge palms had grown even warmer than usual over the course of his fever, swam through Taki's mind as he stood before the truck.

Which was possibly why he didn't notice them until they stood around him in a semicircle.

'Hey, _Schlitzaugen_.'

Taki turned in surprise.

Six of them. The oldest boy seemed to be around seventeen. The youngest, who hovered in the background, looked a few years younger.

Most of them were bigger than Taki.

Their looks were ones Taki had seen before. He tensed up and he felt his body instantly shift into defence mode. They stared him down on the deserted street, puffs of steam emerging from their mouths and noses in the chilled air.

'What do you want?' Taki said quietly, relieved to hear he sounded guarded and not angry.

They're just kids, he told himself, remembering his first day at Luckenwalde. It would be almost too easy, despite how big they are. Despite it being six against one. _Control yourself._

'Listen to that,' said the one closest to Taki. 'My dad's right. He talks like he thinks he's one of us.'

A small, humourless snigger riffled through them.

Taki thought he recognised the one who had spoken. The sheriff's son. He recalled an old moment of hostility in the town's hardware store. How the sheriff had leaned back on his elbow and scrutinised Taki unkindly. He hadn't said a word but his lazy eyes carried a passive threat.

_We don't serve your kind here._

The same sentiment surrounded him now, taking the form of impertinent leers and the threat of something more.

But Taki had learned since Luckenwalde, when he had taken down a small group of bullies who had meant him no real harm. He had also learned, since his brush with the sheriff and the owner of the hardware store, that he wouldn't be so easily welcomed into Klaus' world.

Klaus had withstood the same hostility in the east. It was time for him to do the same. So he stood his ground and waited.

He stood his ground even when the sheriff's son deftly pulled a small knife out of his pocket, which flashed under the streetlamp as he gripped it almost casually.

'Franz, come on,' said a quiet, hesitant voice from the back of the group. 'That's enough...'

Taki recognised it. He glanced at the boy who stood furthest away. The lanky form and the flushed cheeks were familiar.

'Rudi?'

Rudi caught Taki's eye only for a moment before turning away, looking like he would rather be anywhere else in the world.

The sheriff's son smirked.

'Rudi here tells us you and your bodyguard moved in for good.'

He held the knife by his side casually. Taki tried to keep his gaze level.

'Bought the place, did you? Bought Saxon farmers off their land and moved right on in. Is that what you orientals are doing now?'

He took a slow step towards Taki.

'Just 'cause you beat us in the last war, you think you're better than us?'

Both of Taki's arms were weighed down by the bags of food and medicine.  _Don't react._

'Or is it that you think you're _one_ of us?'

A few of the others closed in as well. And then suddenly Franz had stepped right up to Taki and knocked the bags to the ground. Bottles smashing, stains spreading on the paper bag, bits of glass scattering over the dusty street.

The knife then suddenly flashed through the air, swiping sideways, amateurish and not nearly close enough for contact. It was still so sudden that Rudi called out in alarm and Taki jolted backwards.

Franz drew back and laughed loudly as though it was the funniest joke in the world.

'Jumpy little thing, aren't you?'

He then stepped around Taki towards the pick-up. It was a second-hand truck Taki had bought when they first arrived and one Klaus had grown especially fond of. The sheriff's son dragged his knife across it, from the door handle all the way along the body. The grating, piercing sound filled the night. Taki felt it in the back of his teeth.

The others watched, some serious, others smirking and Rudi looking miserable.

After making the thin, deep gouge, Franz then turned to Taki and pocketed the knife.

'We're not stupid,' he said. 'You're lucky you have your own guard dog up there. We know who he is. He'll probably beat us to a pulp if we mess up that pretty face of yours.'

Franz then walked backwards and away, keeping his eyes on Taki. The others began to follow. Franz' final words were called over his shoulder.

'Just because you live here and speak our language doesn't make you one of us, _Schlitzaugen_. Watch your back.'

Taki watched and waited until they rounded the corner and were completely out of sight. The air was cold and still. Taki unclenched his fists and his pulse steadied. He glanced at the mess on the floor. 

He then slowly knelt on the ground and tried to gather together what he could. The shops had all closed, after all. And Klaus was ill.

The words spoken by the sheriff's son were still ringing dully in his ears by the time he heard footsteps.

Tensing again, he glanced up.

It was Rudi. He approached alone, his hands out a little and his face beseeching. He stopped in front of Taki. For a moment, it looked as though he didn't know what to do with his heavy, gangly arms.

He's getting tall, Taki thought idly.

'I'm sorry,' he said, in a voice that sounded a lot younger than fifteen. 'I'm sorry, I tried to tell them not to – and I didn't think Franz would –'

After a tense second where he couldn't seem to find the words, he abruptly crouched in front of Taki and began to salvage what he could from the broken glass.

Taki watched him for a moment, remembering how a silent, shy Rudi had helped his father turn the boiler room into Taki's bedroom. He then stooped over once more to pick glass away from a soup can. They worked in silence for a while.

'Please don't tell my father,' Rudi implored suddenly without even looking up.

Taki thought of Verner's small, kind eyes widening in dismay and knew he could never bring himself to do it.

'I won't.'

Rudi then looked up and met his gaze head-on.

'Are you – are you going to tell Klaus?'

For a split second, the genuine fear in Rudi's eyes almost made Taki want to laugh.

'No,' he promised.

Rudi's relief was tangible.

When they had gathered together what they could and Taki loaded it into the truck, Rudi stood nearby, apparently locked in some kind of internal struggle.

'I don't – I don't think that,' he finally said, in something close to an outburst. 'What Franz said about you being here. I don't think that. I... I like that you're here.'

Taki stared in surprise, embarrassed by the way that Rudi's entire face was consumed in a fierce blush. He wondered how to respond.

'I – thank you,' he said finally.

It was only after he spoke that he realised he meant it quite sincerely.

Rudi thrust his hands into his pockets and turned to head back up the street. He refused the offer, blushing again, when Taki asked if he wanted a lift home.

* * *

_THREE YEARS LATER_

During their third autumn at the cottage, one afternoon found Taki in the living room trying to balance their revenue against expenses while Klaus was outside trying to jump start the faulty combine again. Hand-picking, he realised, might have to make a come back that season.

He gave up on the combine and went inside, wiping grease off his hands onto the sides of his work pants. He was contemplating taking a shower before he caught sight of Taki on the living room couch covered in documents, lost in his little world of numbers. Klaus wondered fondly whether anything had really had changed since the young commander had pored over telegrams in his office at the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

And so Klaus, still in his grease-stained pants, sprawled himself liberally over the papers on the couch just so he could lie in Taki's lap and revel in the look of annoyance and the huff. The still-absent gaze.

It came to Klaus suddenly: the image of Taki as an old man, glasses-bedecked, doing the same thing with almost the same look on his face. And Klaus was taken up in a sudden wave of love. 

He refused to budge and Taki was forced to work around him.

Taki had cushioned their move with enough money from his income and inheritance that they would be able to keep their heads above water for the first few months. But by then, they had hired workers for each harvest and organised distributors and market fairs and deals. Despite his seriousness about the upcoming harvest and his absent annoyance over Klaus' antics, Taki secretly loved the work. Even the planning and the bookkeeping.

Klaus could read him well enough by then to be able to tell. His eyes simmered through half lids as he watched Taki work.

Taki then remembered something. He reached over to the coffee table, Klaus' head still inconveniently in his lap, to sift through one of the piles of papers.

'I found one of Claudia's old letters in a pile of receipts,' he said as he handed Klaus a sheet of familiar writing.

The letter was nearly three years old; the first that Claudia had sent after hearing about Klaus and Taki's permanent move. Klaus smiled as he read over the first few lines. Taki watched him for a few seconds, realising his reprimand had gone unnoticed.

'Klaus, there's an entire drawer for things like letters –'

'Yeah, yeah.'

'You could even just give them to me and I can file them away properly so we don't mix up all our –'

'Oh, come on, it's just one letter from three years ago,' returned Klaus, who always rather enjoyed their mundane bickering. 'Won't happen again, Commander.'

Taki bit back his reply, not without some effort, and returned to the numbers.

Klaus kept smiling as he revisited Claudia's barely concealed excitement. She had followed that up with an almost equally happy report of their new life in the capital three hours away. Klaus read through to the final few lines.

_One last thing before I sign off: please keep an eye out for Ori! That silly cat was a ghost in the weeks leading up to our move. We sent out search parties for her to no avail and Eva is still upset over it. We even asked the new owners to let us know if she ever made a comeback but since they didn't once see her in over two months, I think it's a safe bet she's finally left us for good. Anyway, I thought I'd mention it to you just to mollify Eva, poor thing._

_Honestly, that Ori. I don't think I'll understand cats for as long as I live._

Klaus flipped the page down and peered over it at the armrest of the couch. Ori slept there in a perfect geometrical circle beside Taki's mug of tea.


	38. The Other Side of the Sky II

'Klaus, get off.'

'Come on...'

'Not now!'

'Why not?'

'You said yourself I have to keep an eye on the broth or it might boil over –'

'Ah, don't listen to _me._ Half the time I make things up to sound like I know what I'm doing. Besides,' he added in a low growl, 'something else is about to boil over.'

_'Klaus –'_

Between the persistence of Klaus' embrace behind him and the heat of the stove in front, Taki was getting more flustered by the second. And then he felt stubble on his neck. Lips. A small nip of teeth.

The broth simmered on the stove, filling the kitchen with the earthy, enveloping smell of vegetable stock. It was a sight and smell Taki had been enjoying until Klaus stopped to peek over his shoulder at its progress; a subtle move that soon escalated. Now Klaus was pressing into his back and his hands roved over Taki's abdomen.

'They might get back soon,' Taki tried, irritated to hear he sounded just slightly breathless.

'They'll be shooting the breeze at Verner's for hours, trust me. He and Claudia don't stop talking once they start.'

'But...'

Over the years, Klaus felt he had almost perfected the art of seducing Taki. It took patience and a learned hand. But that particular day, a week before he was to turn thirty-two, he was impatient for no real reason. So, despite knowing he ought to have spent more time holding Taki against him and maintaining a steady trail of kisses on the back of his neck, his hand wandered far too early to Taki's crotch.

The jarring nature of the grope, plus the thought of the entire Strauss family pouring back in through the front door at any moment, plus Taki's perfectionist need to ensure the meal would be up to scratch, made him click his tongue and slap at Klaus' hand with the wooden spoon. 

'Ow!'

The blow wasn't gentle. Klaus retracted and stared in surprise.

'I want to get this right,' said Taki, turning to the side so Klaus could see his half-irritation and half-guilt in profile. His face was a little red.

Klaus chuckled and backed off.

'Whatever you say, Master.'

Being able to touch Taki almost whenever he wanted, with no need to worry about Uemura or Haruki or Suguri or small, impressionable children being on the other side of the door, had relaxed Klaus a great deal over the years. Though he was reticently aware that Taki had never once made the first move, he was willing to let that slide. He also tried to ignore his latent paranoia that he was still, in some way, having to convince Taki to sleep with him almost every time.

Paranoia, Klaus told himself as he stepped out onto the lawn outside.

Taki returned to the pot and stirred, trying to get his pulse to settle. Despite what he had said, his whole body had responded to having Klaus so close behind him. He could still feel the small sting of teeth on his neck. Especially the abruptness of the hand on his cock.

Still, with Claudia and Wilhelm and the kids visiting, he decided it would do them both some good to control themselves for a weekend.

The phone rang twenty minutes later, just as Klaus was coming back from the vegetable garden. Out of the corner of his eye, Taki saw Klaus' hands were smeared with soil and that his shirt was slung casually over his shoulder.

'Hello?'

Taki kept a surreptitious watch on Klaus as he reached his free hand up to absently scratch the back of his head. The muscles of his arm stretched and contracted. There was a light gloss of sweat on his washboard stomach. His belt hung low on his hips. Pulse picking up again, Taki turned back to the chopping board.

'Yeah, I figured,' said Klaus after a pause. 'Have fun.'

He hung up.

'Told you,' he said to Taki. 'Verner brought out pretzels and Claudia said they're going to be another half hour at least.'

He tossed his shirt over the back of a kitchen chair and was about to head outside again when the intuition he had honed over the years came through for him. Detecting a strange vibe in Taki's silence, he turned in time to see Taki do the same.

'The – the broth's done,' Taki said stiffly.

Klaus flicked a glance at the pot on the countertop and back at Taki. He tried to identify the look on Taki's face.

'Good,' he said, nonplussed.

Taki opened his mouth and closed it once more. Klaus waited.

And then it clicked.

Not exactly a first move, but close enough.

Klaus tried to wipe the soil from his hands as he crossed the small space to Taki but they still left faint streaks of black like charcoal on Taki's neck and clothes. Taki pressed back against him when they kissed, his hands gripping Klaus' shoulders. Klaus pulled him away from the counter and onto the kitchen table.

The rose-engraved flower vase that Taki made, and which hadn't once been removed from its place on the kitchen table, only survived the onslaught thanks to Klaus' inordinate amount of affection for it.

It perched safely on one of the chairs until the table became free again.

* * *

_Dear Claudia,_

_Thanks for the birthday card. Please pass on my thanks to Wilhelm for his hastily scrawled signature at the bottom of the card and his lack of message. Really brought a tear to my eye._

_Don't worry about not being able to make it over this year. Thirty-three means I'm officially well into my thirties and I don't want to be reminded of that. I'm sorry, that was insensitive of me. You're practically an old maid now, after all._

_It was a low-key day today, unlike my birthday three years ago. You remember what Taki got me back then, right?_

Klaus had woken alone on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, already caving to the irrational conviction that his best years were behind him. Just as he was beginning to wonder why Taki wasn't beside him to assuage his fears, he heard a strange set of noises outside.

He sleepily shuffled to the front door and swung it open to see Taki standing beyond the short front gate beside a tall black stallion, its burnished ebony coat glistening in the sun.

A speechless Klaus recognised the horse from a recent market fair where he had spent a while admiring its strength and size.

'Imagine him running through the long grass behind the cottage,' he had said wistfully to Taki, without any agenda.

Taki had imagined it too. It blended perfectly with a thought he once had about filling the Reizen grounds with horses, foxes and cats if it made Klaus happier.

Klaus and the stallion, Wolfsbane, were instant kindred spirits. The small shed out back was extended and outfitted as a stable and Klaus spent many a happy afternoon grooming him and explaining to him the finer points of distinction between western and eastern cuisine.

In exchange, on Taki's birthday that year, Klaus arranged for all of his sisters and Sumi to arrive at the cottage and surprise him. He also filled countless jars and pots with his own homemade rose jam; Claudia's recipe which he had first shared with Taki in Luckenwalde and which was well received by the entire Reizen family as they huddled around the fire in the thick of winter.

* * *

_I can't believe it's been almost seven years. Have you ever had the feeling you slipped into someone else's life? A life you barely deserve but which, for whatever reason, you find yourself waking to every single day?_

_Of course, there have been moments over the past seven years that I wish, with my whole heart, I could take back._

Klaus wrote those words to Claudia with one particular moment in mind, one that took place less than a year after they moved.

Though their work on the farm kept them both active and fairly fit, Taki sometimes caught Klaus on the lawn outside in the middle of work out routines and felt the need to keep at it himself.

One afternoon towards the end of summer, Klaus returned from town with ingredients for his grandfather's strudel. He glanced out of the kitchen window to see Taki lunging and whirling across the lawn, sweat shining on his face and flying off his fringe and a broken rake handle, in his hands, having been transformed into a weapon.

An old excitement flickered to life. Klaus dislodged the handle of an old mop and strolled down the back steps, twirling the plastic beside him almost casually, revelling in the way Taki glanced round in surprise, chest still heaving.

'Round three?' Klaus said, his tone deceptively light.

Taki's stomach somersaulted at the way his eyes flashed beside the slightly raised, golden scar which made him look even fiercer.

A few minutes later, Verner stuck his head out of his garage, wondering about the strange reverberating, insistent clacking noise. It occurred to him that he might be hearing the rare sound of two male deer going head-to-head in a battle for territory, antlers locking and clashing.

Taki found himself on the defensive as much as not. As had happened before, Klaus' size alone nearly made him lose his footing. On top of that was his speed and aggression.

But Taki was quicker still; his moves more precise and disciplined. He caught Klaus off guard a few times at the tail end of his attacks when Klaus' heavy momentum slowed him down by a fraction. Still, Klaus always managed to recover in time.

Neither was willing to let up, even for a second.

'Not going to lose,' Klaus panted between lunges, 'just because you trip me up again. No tricks this time.'

A particularly strong blow of plastic on wood sent them both back a few steps. Klaus laughed.

Taki's body was alight with the adrenaline of combat. He reminded himself that, though he never stood a chance against Klaus' brawn when Klaus seized him or pinned him, in a situation like this, he had already proven twice before, once at Luckenwalde and once at the compound, that he was the better fighter.

It took three more strikes. On the first lure, Taki tested Klaus' balance. On the second, his speed. And on the third, he waited for the right moment after Klaus' lunge to side-swipe him across his left arm and back. Klaus ducked and Taki missed.

The rake handle instead thwacked loudly into the left side of Klaus' face. Right across his scar.

With a surprised grunt, Klaus staggered to the floor on all fours, the plastic handle falling onto the grass.

Taki's heart sank and he dropped his own makeshift shinai.

'Klaus! Are you okay?'

He heard a short chuckle before Klaus reared back up, dragging the back of his hand across his sore cheek.

'I guess that's three out of three.'

Before Taki could get another word in, he was caught up in a whirlwind of Klaus' arms and lips and tongue. He could barely remember the steps they took back into the cottage, through the kitchen and hallway and into the bedroom. The next thing he knew, Klaus' impatient hands were roaming beneath his shirt.

Even through the familiar fog taking over his mind, Taki still saw the way his stick had collided with the side of Klaus' face. The way Klaus had stumbled.

It had been over a year since the shrapnel had blazed a permanent trail across Klaus' face. But the guilt was fresh.

Klaus sensed something different in the way Taki reached up to touch his cheek. The fingers brushed delicately over the scar and pulled with almost clinical care against the healthy skin around it. As though Taki was checking for damage.

Sighing in fond exasperation, Klaus bent low to kiss him. He met a guilty gaze.

'It's fine, really,' he said, hearing the hoarseness of his own voice. He wanted, badly, to be inside Taki. To channel the adrenaline of their sparring into something else. But his conscience had stretched across this urge like a thin forcefield, telling him to reassure his master first.

'Are you sure?' Taki asked.

'I promise. In fact, feel worse for you. You're the one who has to see it all the time.'

Taki's fingers traced the scar again. The ridge started and ended thin but widened slightly in the middle where it had cut deepest. It was the same colour as Klaus' skin with a glossy tint. A whiplash frozen across his face.

'I don't think it's – I don't mind it.'

After a whole year, Taki couldn't recall Klaus' face without it. He had become quite attached to it.

'You don't hate it?'

Words that were covered in a light dusting of insecurity. Taki almost smiled.

'No.'

'You can tell me. I promise I won't burst into tears.'

'It's not –' Taki struggled and prayed he wasn't blushing. 'It almost... suits you.'

Eyebrows went up. Taki regretted his words immediately.

'Really?'

Taki let out a short, frustrated sigh. His blush had spread a little. Klaus' eyebrows went up further, now complemented by a small smirk.

'So you don't hate it.'

But the self-consciousness was gone from his voice.

'No,' Taki repeated.

'Do you maybe... in fact... like it?'

No response.

_Does it, maybe, turn you on a little bit?_

But Klaus wasn't game enough to ask. Instead, he channelled his line of questioning elsewhere and felt blood rush to his cock again at the sight of Taki, who had so soundly defeated him on the lawn outside, lying flushed and prone beneath him.

‘Tell me what else turns you on.’

Taki made a sound of annoyance; a defiance that he struggled to maintain when Klaus pulled off Taki's clothes one by one, none too gently. His naked body was revealed piece by piece.

'Does it turn you on when I touch you here?'

And the tip of his finger slipped into Taki's hole.

_'Mmh...'_

Klaus watched with a grin as he probed and stretched Taki out. _Almost_ , he thought. _That was almost an answer. Let's see how far you'll go._

'How does it feel when I...'

His cock slipped in and filled Taki in one push. Taki gasped and arched himself up into Klaus' body.

'...thrust into you, right to the hilt?'

Klaus' voice emerged strained and tight. He held himself there for a few beats before he began moving, holding Taki down by his shoulders, biting lightly at his neck and earlobes. Taki groaned.

'How does it feel?'

Klaus drew back to angle his hips so he would brush against Taki's sweet spot, making him cling helplessly to the sheets, eyes glazed.

'Tell me,' Klaus said.

Even in his state, a thorny feeling began to overtake Taki.

He was used to Klaus' vocalisations during sex, but this time it was different. This time, it was like Klaus was waiting for an answer. 

'Come on,' Klaus insisted, his smile playful and wicked as he kept thrusting. Sweat had gathered on his face. 'Tell me. Tell me you want it.'

Klaus relished the moans and Taki's grip on his shoulders and the smell of him and the feel of him. But he wanted to tease something more out of him for the first time.

'Nngh! Ugh... Klaus...'

Taki's utterance, Klaus knew, was a small protest. But still he kept it up, wondering if a little more urging was all it would take, imagining how it would feel to hear him say it felt good. Or that he liked it. Or anything.

'Just say it.'

Taki felt as though he was in the middle of a glaring, interrogative spotlight. Not for the first time, it was only Klaus waiting for a simple reply to a simple request. Something that anyone else would have been able to give him. And yet...

_Someone who deserves your light._

It's not me, Taki realised yet again. He turned away, his lips tight and only barely holding back the moans that were pushed from him with each thrust. Tears threatened to spring.

'Come on,' Klaus urged. 'Say it –'

'Stop.'

It took Klaus a second for the word to sink in.

It was the first time since they were in the middle of the war, since Klaus had vowed never to touch him without his consent again, that Taki had ever told him to stop.

'Taki –'

'Please, just...' Taki couldn't look at him. 'Stop. Just... get off.'

He didn't mean for it to sound so harsh. He only needed a second to gather himself. He needed a breather so he could come to terms with an inadequacy that seemed new but was the oldest one he had nurtured.

Klaus felt Taki closing to him. He was both inside Taki and suddenly far away. Taki's face was turned to the side and he was doing all he could to avoid Klaus' eye. 

After all that time, Klaus couldn't stand it when Taki turned away from him.

It wasn't a snap decision so much as his handing over the reins completely to the creature within. The one who controlled both himself and Taki in that moment. 

Suddenly he had held Taki's hands down above his head. And thrust in again.

* * *

Taki let out a small cry. His eyes widened and he turned to look at Klaus in confusion.

His insides went cold when he recognised the look in Klaus' eye. The glint. He knew his Klaus had receded. And in his place -

 _'Say_ it,' Klaus hissed.

A deep, territorial plunge. Taki moaned and tried to tug his hands free.

'Klaus, stop!'

A slowly building panic. Drawing less on what was happening there and more on what had happened once a long time ago.

Klaus held him down fast, his body hard and unmovable, and his cock kept thrusting.

'Stop –!'

Klaus' next words were uttered through clenched teeth and sounded as though they were torn from a place of darkness.

'Why can't you just fucking _say it?'_

Before there was time for the words to really leave an impact, Klaus had suddenly pulled out and rolled off him.

Taki gasped in the sudden empty space. It took him a few seconds to find his breath. Klaus had moved to the edge of the bed and sat there silently, his shoulders rising and falling as he panted. Taki couldn't see his face.

He tried to sit up.

'Klaus –'

Something about Klaus' stillness scared Taki more than what had just happened. He reached out, almost without thinking, to touch his arm. To fix this – whatever this was.

Klaus jerked away from his touch.

Still without looking at Taki, he got up and pulled his clothes on and left the room.

Taki was left breathing heavily in his wake. He realised it was the first time Klaus had ever recoiled from him like that. The feeling was brittle and awful.

* * *

Klaus spent a long time in the rose garden. He half expected Taki to follow and was grateful when he was left alone for as long as he needed. After he left the garden, not yet feeling ready to go back inside, he tried to put his mind to some of the chores he had been avoiding. But he found he couldn't concentrate.

His mind was a whirl of fury. At Taki's constant, perpetual, everlasting distance. His silences and his revulsion. His revulsion. Because, clearly, a part of Taki still found what they were doing, what they were, morally repugnant. Something to be done and then shelved and never spoken of. So it would be harder for the gods to keep score.

If he could just squeeze a word out of him, Klaus had thought. A few little words so Klaus could finally know for sure. Was it really so hard for Taki to give up just another small piece of himself? He had given so much already, so surely this...

He's given so much already, a small voice reminded Klaus.

Gods above, he's given so much. Look where you are. Look where he is.

He suddenly dredged up an old memory; one that he had mulled over from time to time and which seemed especially relevant now. A year ago, when Taki took leave of his sisters in the front of the Reizen property, Klaus had heard all sorts of lamentations; how much they would miss their brother, how they would think of him often and how they would write all the time. Taki had returned each sentiment.

And yet Klaus had never once heard the word 'love' pass anyone's lips. It was never uttered by either Taki or his sisters, whether gravely or affectionately or otherwise. He remembered how much the little observation had startled him.

In hindsight, the taboo nature of that particularly overzealous expression did seem in keeping with their culture; the entire culture, and almost certainly those with Taki's standing. But it was a particularity that had somehow eluded him over the two years he had spent with Taki in the east.

He wondered about it again as he stood in the garden, being benignly judged by the roses in their summer bloom.

And then it hit him, with a near-sickening force, how close he had come to repeating the single worst mistake he had ever made. Something he couldn't atone for no matter how many times he put his life on the line. Something unforgiveable that Taki had somehow forgiven.

He went inside and stood in the kitchen for a while, trying to imagine what he would do or say if he went into the bedroom. When every single one of his ideas seemed woefully inadequate, he instead turned and unpacked the ingredients he had just bought.

* * *

Meanwhile, unsure of what to do with himself, Taki had gotten dressed and remained on the bed for the past hour and a half, floating in and out of a fitful sleep. He awoke to the smell of baking pastry. 

He had enough dignity and self-respect to know he ought to be angry. He knew that Klaus had broken his trust. Klaus had broken his own vow, or at least come dangerously close. He knew that Klaus should ask his forgiveness.

But none of those rationalisms made even a dent in the only emotion that had taken over since Klaus jerked away from his hand. He was, quite simply, afraid Klaus was still angry at him.

He took a few nervous steps into the kitchen and stopped.

Klaus didn't turn to look at him.

Taki stared at his broad back and his hands busy at work. On the counter, a few feet to Klaus' right, there was a chopping board laden with rosy apples and a knife.

Anxious, guilty, desperate to do something with his hands, Taki went to the board and picked up the knife. He drew one of the apples towards him.

He then realised he had no idea how apples were sliced for a strudel. He also realised, in a moment of surreal foolishness, that he was too nervous to ask.

Only a few seconds into Taki's ridiculous deadlock, Klaus suddenly sagged. He held the spoon limply on the counter beside the bowl of flour and cinnamon and stared straight down. He turned to Taki, whose pulse raced for a split second. 

Then he pulled Taki close against his chest.

Relief flooded Taki right to his fingertips. He felt the distinct sensation of something melting behind his ribcage. He held the back of Klaus' shirt.

 _My wolf,_ Taki thought, as though the words had been waiting somewhere for the past hour and a half before falling on him. _My knight. All of him is mine. Every part of him, every side to him. And I can't keep letting him down like this._

'I'm sorry,' he said.

Klaus made a noise of frustration.

'Don't you fucking apologise,' he said, his voice low. 'You didn't do anything. I'm the one – I don't know what happened. That wasn't me.'

_Or was it?_

'I'm sorry,' he said.

Bur Taki wasn't ready to let it go. He had to say it now or the chance wouldn't come up again and he would keep hurting Klaus in the same way.

 _There are some things,_ Meiji had said, _that are so inherent to our natures that it is impossible to change them, no matter what the circumstances._

'Klaus,' he said. 'I –there are some things I just – I can't say.'

'I know.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I know.'

Klaus pulled back a little to look at him properly and his heart gave a small thud at Taki's look of nervous, guilty relief. He smiled weakly before he went on, aware of how his words were about to sound.

'It's just that, even now, I feel like I'm taking advantage of you every time I touch you.'

Taki stared and began to shake his head, wondering how in the world he could start to assure Klaus of how much -

'I need to know that it's not just me,' said Klaus, echoing something he had said long ago, something that had gone unanswered. 'I need to know you want to as well. You do, right? Even if you can't say it?'

There was a long, drawn-out pause.

Eyes on Klaus' chest, Taki nodded once.

Klaus let out a quiet exhale and kissed Taki on the forehead through his hair. Without another word, he then moved back to the bowl and picked the spoon off the counter.

After a few moments, Taki also turned his attention back to the apples, almost light-headed with relief.

Klaus threw him a sideways glance when he picked up the knife again.

'Cubes,' he said with a small grin, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart. 'About this big.'

* * *

_I think I've grown, Claud. I hope I have. (I can hear you saying you hope so too.) There might be moments I wish I could take back, but at least, in the past seven years, I never repeated them again._

_There are secrets Taki keeps from me, and I've finally come to accept that. After all, I_ _kept my own secrets for a good long while. I lied when I first came to Taki in Luckenwalde. I lied about so much before I was really his. And even after all that, it took years before I was able to talk about the first war. And so it's only fair for me to let him keep things to himself._

He remembered how evasive Taki had been about the long scratch along the body of their truck. He claimed to have scratched it against a gate, which, given Taki's proficience behind the wheel, struck Klaus as highly suspicious.

But he had learned by then that pressing for answers would only bring about more anger and more silence. So he had changed the topic swiftly and noticed the way Taki tried to hide his relief.

* * *

_Now that I'm thinking back on all of it, I guess the first year or so was filled with old mistakes._

_But since then, things have been good. Better than I ever dared to hope, in fact._

_Taki's been keeping track of what's going on in the east, which helps me feel less guilty about how far I've dragged him from his homeland. We get missives and things from the emperor himself from time to time. Did you hear they're calling him the most beloved emperor of our age? I take some credit for that._

Only a few days before Klaus wrote those words, Taki had walked slowly through the front door sorting through the mail. He had one letter opened already.

'News from the east?' Klaus asked from the couch where he was fine-tuning the gramophone.

He recognised the emblem on the letter through the page. It had come from the Fifteenth Armoured Division, which had been turned into a permanent military training base a year after Taki left for the west. Six years on, Uemura was still its official commander and, owing to a staunch loyalty that refused to ebb after all that time, he took it upon himself to keep Taki up to date every so often.

'Uemura's looking to retire in the next year,' Taki said. 'They're vetting possible candidates for Division Commander.'

'Anyone we know?'

Taki kept reading and raised his eyebrows in surprise.

'Lieutenant Colonel Yamamoto.'

The name didn't register with Klaus for a moment.

'Yama-?'

He looked up in mild shock.

'Not Haruki?'

'Apparently so.'

'There's no way the kid's a lieutenant colonel! He's only –'

The years caught up to him then in one big hit. Almost seven of them.

'He'd be... twenty-one by now. My God.'

A twinge of sadness. He remembered wishing Haruki would do something else with his life. They hadn't heard from him in all that time and Klaus had wondered once or twice whether he was out there somewhere, bookish and dedicated, dazzling the world with his inventions.

'At least it's peacetime,' he reasoned aloud, thinking how Meiji had kept his vow. 'The kid'll be fine.'

Taki heard the note of protectiveness in Klaus' voice and smiled. He filed the letter away in the bureau by the living room window.

As he closed the drawer, it felt as though the thought of war had seeped into the room through cracks in the door and windows. Taki somehow knew Klaus was thinking of it too. They were united in their vague distrust of peace. Their constant paranoia about what was around the corner.

Klaus took a breath and went to stand beside him, suddenly itching for a cigarette.

 _There's no honour in war,_ Meiji had said to him once in a courtyard in Eurote. _No matter why it's waged, or how. As long as I have the throne, there won't be another one._

Not a peep from the east, the west or Eurote about any more nuclear threats. No border disputes or claims to land. No civil wars or cold wars or anything that threatened the peace they had built. The peace that rippled through the freshly harvested stalks outside.

And so Klaus thought he'd liven the mood.

'Glad the kid kept our little secret this whole time,' he said reflectively. 'We chose a good bunch, in the end. Even if we didn't have much choice about most of them.'

Claudia, Suguri, Haruki, Meiji. And Hans. Hans, who had driven them apart and brought them back even closer than before, and whose name neither had spoken over the years.

Unbeknownst to either Klaus or Taki, however, there was one more name on the list.

* * *

The previous year, when the Strauss family visited for a weekend and Taki had fended off Klaus' advances by the stove, Heinrich was making his way from Verner's farm back to his uncle's.

He was tired of listening to his mother and Verner speaking of things that bored him to tears. His sister, of course, sat perfectly still and upright and listened as though it was the most fascinating conversation in the world.

But at twelve years old, Heinrich couldn't bring himself to pretend. He had slipped out when he had the chance, ignoring his father's disapproving glance, and headed back towards the cottage.

He had been pleased with Klaus' comments about how much taller he had gotten. He had been especially happy when Taki quietly agreed.

He always enjoyed being around the pair. There was a sense about them, which he picked up despite his age, that they had seen more than they could possibly explain. As though they carried secrets of the world that Heinrich couldn't even imagine. He eagerly devoured stories about the war whenever Klaus was in the mood. He envied them for their wisdom and their experiences and sometimes felt oddly frustrated that men like them seemed so content to have retired to such a quiet corner of the world.

Grappling with those thoughts, Heinrich reached the back of the cottage and glanced through the window.

He froze.

It took a few seconds for him to understand what he was seeing. And when he did, he dropped to the ground, heart pounding madly in his ears.

He would sift through the images in silence for a long time. His uncle on top of the kitchen table. Taki beneath him, his legs open and hooked around Klaus' lower back. The way Taki seemed to cling to him. The specific, violent, intimate gyrations. Heinrich's face was hot with humiliation and his pulse still hammered. He backtracked quickly and quietly.

And he spent the entire afternoon trying to understand. He tried to remember how he once felt about his uncle. Lycanthrope. The war hero and pilot and knight.

That evening, when the family gathered for dinner, during a moment when Heinrich wasn't paying attention, Taki leaned in from behind him to put Heinrich's plate in front of him. He glanced up in surprise and hoped Taki, whose small smile was as gentle as ever, didn't see how flustered he was. He was still trying to understand how someone like Taki, quiet and noble and dignified, almost like his own father, had been turned into... whatever it was he had spied through the window.

He cast a nervous glance at Klaus, who was across the table listening with an amused smirk to one of Eva's stories about boarding school. Taki went to sit beside him.

Heinrich found himself staring at Taki again. Remembering. Imagining –

'You okay there, Wolverine?' Klaus said suddenly.

Heinrich looked round with a start, somehow feeling like he'd been caught looking earlier that day.

'Yes,' he replied.

Klaus looked at him quizzically for a moment before turning back to Eva, who resumed her story. Taki listened in.

They were still the same, Heinrich realised in a moment of gentle clarity. There was nothing different about them. At all.

And so he began to eat.

* * *

_Little things keep surprising me. Good things mostly._

_Like how Taki recently managed to win the whole town over. The sheriff's wife was broken down in the middle of nowhere and Taki happened to drive by. He fixed the car in no time, of course, and even made sure she got home safe before turning back. The old gossip told the entire town about her knight from the east (even though Taki barely thought it was worth a story when he came home). I never did like that sheriff or his weasely kid – always felt as though they had it in for Taki for some reason. But not even he can do anything now. Not when Taki's the darling of the town._

Klaus paused in the middle of writing with a smile. It seemed there were no end of stories that he could pour onto the page.

There was one last one, however, that had to be his favourite of all.

_Just last month, we camped for a whole week in Mother’s little clearing. It was originally supposed to be a couple of days but we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave..._

* * *

They were lost to the world for a whole week, even though, by that stage, they had already been lost to the world for years.

Before they began the hike up the side of the waterfall, Klaus and Taki stood by the small river which carried the pleasantly mottled reflection of multicoloured trees. The lively, temperate spring morning had brought several locals down to the riverbank. A few families and couples picnicked on the grass.

Klaus, in his own words, was well into his thirties. It had been a while since he had indulged the juvenile thrill of challenging Taki to feats of strength and speed. Under the warm blanket of the past few years' peace, he had settled down considerably.

Or so Taki thought.

'I bet the water's the perfect temperature for a dip,' Klaus said in a would-be careless drawl.

Taki absently murmured his agreement. Klaus' lips curled into a smile Taki didn't see in time.

'You'll let me know, won't you?'

Before Taki could shoot Klaus a questioning glance, Klaus had seized him and tossed him deftly into the water.

Several people nearby looked up at the sound.

Taki's stomach flipped horribly as he was made weightless; a sensation that was replaced immediately by the cold shock of hitting the water. The river was too deep to gain any footing so he surfaced with a gasp and began to tread water.

Just in time to see Klaus dive in fully clothed as well, sending a fresh wave of water over him.

Klaus swam close enough to see what he had envisioned years ago; clothes plastered enticingly to Taki's slender, lithe body and angry dark eyes glinting through wet hair. He let out a loud laugh and tried to sidle up to Taki in the water.

Furious at Klaus, and mindful of people who could see, Taki pushed him away with a swell of water that hit Klaus in the face. Klaus' laugh, however, left a crack in his armour.

As did the juvenile challenge to race him to the waterfall and the unfair headstart. Taki had half a mind to crawl back up onto the shore. But, with an annoyed glance at Klaus' figure pulling away through the water, he sighed and followed.

Despite the headstart, Klaus only beat him by a few strokes.

* * *

Once they reached the fall, which was impossibly loud up close, to Taki's surprise, Klaus pushed right through it and disappeared.

When Taki followed and emerged on the other side, he was surprised to find he was in a small, echoing stone alcove, shielded from the world by its perpetual white curtain of water. Small drips sounded against the backdrop of the waterfall's constant roar. Hazy, ethereal water reflections danced on the curved roof of the alcove. But he didn't have time to truly appreciate the suspended bubble he had wandered into.

For Klaus had abruptly him pressed up against the stone wall where the water was just shallow enough for their feet to touch the river bed. Taki was caught between Klaus' hard, drenched body and the cold rock.

'Wait –' he started, hearing his voice bounce almost alarmingly all around them.

'No one can see,' Klaus said, predicting his protests. 'Or even hear.'

He licked and sucked at Taki's neck, salty and slick from the water, and began undoing his belt beneath the water. By the time he had tugged Taki's pants free they were both breathing heavily, foreheads pressed together Taki was holding onto his neck and shoulders.

Klaus felt for his hole beneath the water and his cock hardened almost painfully when Taki gasped and held onto him tighter.

When Klaus' cock pushed in, Taki's mind was filled with the whiteness of the fall and the sight of Klaus' sodden hair, a colour that was almost dark, sticking to the side of his face, framing his eyes and scar and jaw.

Then he was lost to the feeling of being filled. Marked. Claimed. He remembered a time in his shower at the compound when he lamented his weakness in Klaus' hands.

And now he revelled in the thrill of that complete surrender. He felt each plunge tear a new, echoing moan from his throat, sometimes forcing him to tilt his head back into the rock wall and other times making him hang his head forwards onto Klaus' wet shoulder. Water swelled and broke against the wall with each thrust.

'Taki,' Klaus breathed. 'Fuck, Taki. You feel so damn good.'

Taki only gripped the back of Klaus' hair and whimpered.

Echoing moans countered by the deafening waterfall.

Vows of purity countered by Klaus' hands.

Uncertainty, inadequacy, guilt and old mistakes, all countered by his love.

'Nngh, Klaus... Klaus... _Klaus!'_

He came only seconds before Klaus, who had been pushed over the edge first by the way his own name had sounded in Taki's broken, breathless voice, echoing around the small space around them. And second because of the unreal pressure of Taki's body seizing around him as he came.

He held Taki fast against the rock for a long time afterwards. Taki, strangely enough, had the distinct feeling that not even the gods had seen them there in that little bubble.

* * *

Taki knew on their first night in the clearing that they would want to stay for longer than two days. They had left a quietly pleased Rudi in charge of the entire cottage as well as Ori and Wolfsbane, and Taki sensed he would be only too willing to extend the favour for them.

They had moved from the bubble of the world behind the waterfall to the open bubble of their hideaway, and the latter proved to be even more hypnotic.

Klaus actually succeeded in showing Taki the orange hide of a fox before it darted away. Deer were a common sight, though they never wandered too close.

And nearby, a thin creek sang on its merry way down the steps.

The tent was pitched and Klaus started a fire. As dusk slowly caved to night, Taki watched, mesmerised as embers leaped from flames to a sky that was overwhelmed with stars.

Klaus sat near him, leaning back on his elbow and staring at the fire. Neither had said a word for quite some time, though Taki still remembered the quiet chuckle that had accompanied his last words.

Now the smile was gone. In its place was quiet contemplation. One that deepened and sank into melancholy as the minutes lengthened. His eyes were on the fire, his face still.

When Taki looked at him like that, he seemed, almost, alone. The sight tugged at his heart in an urgent way. He wondered if he ought to say anything. Or do anything. But a small voice, one that had looked out for them in the shadows, told him Klaus was almost there.

Then the warm yellow gaze was back, flashing in the firelight. Wide lips lifted in a small, sad smile. The scar folded and crinkled near his left eye.

'Did I ever tell you what happened to me in the first war?'

Taki's heart beat a little louder.

'No.'

Klaus stretched out fully, hands behind his head, and his vision filled with the strange beauty of stars bordered by canopy. Like a big, sparkling tear in the sky.

He began by telling Taki the names of all his men. Names which he hadn't spoken aloud even once in the intervening years. Not even to Claudia.

* * *

Early the next morning, Klaus walked back to the tent in the crisp, dewy air holding a handful of mushrooms he had found which, he was almost sure, were edible.

He ducked under the tent flap and saw Taki was slowly waking. Ruffled hair and clothes.

'Morning.'

Klaus crawled over him slowly until the full length of his body hovered over Taki's. His master, who had seen the darkest parts of him, almost since the very beginning, and wanted him still. He stayed there for a few moments before bending low to kiss him.

Then he turned to lie on his back, his head next to Taki's and feet facing away. He inched upwards a little until the top of his head rested against Taki's shoulder and Taki's head rested against his.

'Found breakfast,' he announced. 'I'll cook it up in a minute. It'll either taste amazing or kill us.'

Taki turned to look at him and caught a wink.

'Can't have everything work out, can we? Where's the fun in that?'

There was serene pause where Klaus' own innocuous words recalled an old saying his grandmother, and sister, favoured.

'Know what Claudia reckons someone needs in order to be happy?' he said. 'Something to do, someone to love, and something to wish for.'

Outside the tent, songbirds struck up their choirs, some sweet, some shrill. Taki absorbed the maxim. He saw the wisdom of it. How it reflected the innate need to keep searching. It seemed to suit Klaus especially well.

He hesitated for a long time.

'What – what do you wish for?' he asked finally, a little afraid of the answer.

Klaus looked at him.

Almost everything he had wanted seven years ago had come true.

All that was left was his wish for Taki to be his in every way, without any hesitation. For Taki to say so in a few simple words that would erase any lingering traces of doubt. So that Klaus would know that everything he had done had been done right by his master.

'Nothing at all,' he said.

After a thoughtful pause, he added, 'Claudia must have gotten it wrong, then.'

Taki, who had watched him closely, sensed that he hadn't told the truth.

‘What about you?’ Klaus asked, suddenly a little nervous as well. ‘Anything you wish for?’

Taki looked at him.

_For you to be happy all the time. For me to feel like I deserve all of this. Like I deserve you._

‘No.’

Another silence fell. Their answers, their untruths woven together out of love, were suspended in the cool morning air. Air that would warm steadily over the day as sunlight spilled over the tree tops.

When Klaus next looked at Taki, he seemed to be on the point of saying something. Taki reached his hand up past his shoulder, fingers outstretched. Klaus met him halfway.

For a few seconds, Taki held his hand and laced his fingers between Klaus’. He brushed Klaus’ calloused palm with his thumb.

‘Do you remember back in Luckenwalde,’ Taki began quietly, ‘when we were under the laburnums? I said something in my language. You wouldn’t have understood it back then.’

Klaus remembered as clearly as though it had been the previous day.

_The first time I heard you speak the language of your homeland, it sounded like the warbling of a little bird. The sounds seemed to roll one after another, dancing on your tongue. I didn’t think they were words at all._

‘I remember,’ he said.

_Sing to me one more time, Taki._

‘I’ve always wondered what you said. I didn’t think you’d even remember if I asked.’

_This time, I’ll hear you out until the end._

Taki took a few more moments in silence, just to hold onto his little secret while he could.

Then he repeated the words exactly as he did, in his own language, under the yellow flowers of Luckenwalde.

‘If you only you and I could fly away together,’ he said slowly. ‘To the other side of the sky.’

Klaus’ heart skipped a beat.

He stared at the side of Taki’s face, at the serene gaze that was trained on the roof of their tent as though it was looking through to the dome of blue beyond. He had no idea that Taki's feelings had run so deep and so long ago; since before he was even Klaus’ master to begin with.

He tried to find a response that would do justice to the simplicity and weight of Taki's words.

Then Taki turned to him, his eyes full of love and not a trace of self-consciousness. After holding Klaus' gaze for a while, he closed his eyes and sighed quietly, the faintest of smiles playing on his lips.

And Klaus, smiling gently in his turn, eyes narrowed with tenderness, was suddenly grateful he hadn't thought of anything to say.[*](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/maidenrose/images/e/e4/Tumblr_ltwtrcQ9NI1qmdvkzo1_500.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/346?cb=20140330231859)

* * *

_I think – I hope – he’s happy here. I hope I've finally done enough._

_Anyway, thanks again for the card, Sis. Sending my love to Eva and Wolverine._

_Klaus_

* * *

And so, after traversing east and west, after reaching the ends of the Earth and back, after years of falling apart and coming back together, they found themselves alone in a little rose garden in the west.

In the end, Taki had never in fact brought himself to ask Klaus what it was like to have given everything up for him.

But Taki had given everything up for Klaus in his turn. And he hoped that what he had done would make up for what he couldn't say.

Folded in their diamond-patterned quilt against Klaus' warmth, Taki thought back on their seven years in the same way Klaus had done when he sent his last letter to Claudia. Moments tumbled at him haphazardly, both the bitter and the sweet, the mundane and the uplifting, in no particular order. It was as though the events of the past seven years had all co-existed in one instant.

Occupied in his reverie, it took a while for Taki to remember that Klaus had asked him what had kept him awake in the first place.

The dream. Their multitudes of lives. The way they were torn apart each time.

He remembered something about how, in their final lives, they would carve something out for themselves. A small pocket of peace. A niche in the curse of their intertwined fate.

A curse and a fate which suddenly seemed grandiose and unreal and distant when he had Klaus like this. When they were able to enjoy a simple late hour together like that. So he decided to spare Klaus from it all; to bear it in silence for Klaus' sake.

'I'm not sure,' he replied. 'I just couldn't get back to sleep.'

'We could give it another crack. You sound tired.'

Taki nestled further into the space between Klaus' neck and shoulder. He closed his eyes.

 _And you must know, though_ _I_ _could_ _not express it before, that you have made me_ _happier_ _than_ _I_ _ever_ _thought_ _possible._

Words he would write to Klaus in his final letter almost exactly a year from then.

'Let's stay here a bit longer,' he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazingly talented Tenkamchi-Sama has done a stunning drawing of a scene from this chapter – little Heinrich seeing his uncle and Taki in a compromising position through the kitchen window.
> 
> I'm still trying to get over how good this is and how happy I am that this happened and just in awe of the skill and the feels (KLAUS' FACE IN THAT TINY SLIVER OF A PANEL AND TAKI'S HAIR KILL ME NOW) so I'll stop gushing before I embarrass myself. Thank you Tenkamchi-Sama!!
> 
> For more of her amazing art, check out http://tenkamchi-sama.deviantart.com/gallery/44260736/Maiden-Rose.


	39. Epilogue (end of Part 2)

'Sure,' Klaus replied with a smile. He pulled the blanket tighter around them and shifted lower on the bench.

By then, interpreting Taki's silences had become second nature. He knew Taki hadn't been entirely truthful about what had woken him that night and why he had sought the refuge of the garden. But it didn't really matter, in the end, if it meant they could sit side by side and enjoy the late hour together like that.

As Taki settled against him, Klaus' eyes roamed over the furthest hedge and beyond the brick wall.

Where moonlight glinted off the wing of an airplane that was parked less than a stone's throw away.

It was too dark to make out the crysanthemum icon emblazoned on the tail - Meiji's royal seal - but Klaus could easily see it in his mind's eye. After all, the plane had been a permanent fixture at the cottage over the past seven years since it first brought them there.

_Okay, then. After I’m done flying, I’ll find someone, like you found Papa, who’ll bring me home._

The memory would sometimes surface when Klaus looked through the kitchen window at where the white  _Sagi_ perched in the distance like a silent, overgrown bird. She remained at the end of a makeshift runway of cropped grass that ran behind their property and extended a little into Verner's, who had been more than happy to oblige.

Klaus would smile and think of the day he had spoken his call sign aloud for the first time. He remembered the plans he shared with his mother and the implausible little addendum that made her laugh.

Though he and Taki hadn't yet found the time to fly anywhere in the world whenever they felt like, it was more than enough, he decided, that there was in fact a plane in the backyard.

* * *

In the days after Taki made his proposal beneath the wisteria, Klaus tried on numerous occasions to bring up an important conversation. But he couldn’t do it. Whether because of an irrational fear that simply asking might, even in the slightest, inspire a change of heart, or because Taki’s response might somehow exacerbate his guilt, or for a million other reasons he couldn’t identify, Klaus couldn’t ask him whether he was sure he was doing the right thing.

And so, Klaus for the first time understood Taki’s silent burden over the years. He understood the crushing guilt and gratitude of being the one for whom so much had been given up.

A few days later, Klaus watched as Taki climbed into the backseat of the car beside him. The Reizen daughters looked on tearfully, a moving contrast beside Hasebe and Uemura who saluted in full military dress.

Then their driver slipped the car into gear and pulled out of the Reizen grounds.

Klaus sighed, leaned his head back against the seat and kept his eyes out the window.

Ten minutes later, when it occurred to Taki that neither of them had spoken, he glanced at Klaus out of the corner of his eye. He couldn't be sure if it was a comfortable lull or otherwise. Somehow the silence felt poised and on the point of breaking for a reason he couldn't quite -

'Taki,' Klaus said, quietly but suddenly.

Taki turned and met a gaze which, like the silence that preceded it, he couldn't identify.

Over the past few minutes, Klaus had tried to frame the question in various ways and it always came back to a few bare-bones words.

'Are you sure?' he asked.

Now that he had finally asked, even if it was at the last possible minute, it felt as though a small creature had been let loose from his chest and was no longer his. It now sat between them, naïve and imploring, waiting for Taki's assurance.

It took a few beats for Taki to understand.

'Yes,' he said, confused that Klaus would even ask. 'I'm - of course I'm sure.'

Another silence followed. Just as Taki wondered whether he should say more, Klaus spoke again.

'Just seems too good to be true, you know?'

Taki took in his small, ironic smile. The cut on his face, which hadn't fully scarred over in those early days, was still dark and slightly inflamed.

 _Too good to be true_ was often how Taki had felt whenever Klaus had come back to him from the brink of death.

Although there were a myriad reasons that led to Taki's decision to tear them both away from the life they had known for so long, protecting Klaus was the one that had driven him above all else; the desire to see him safe and happy and far from all the things that had brought out that darkness.

Even if such a thing was impossible to ensure, Taki was going to try. He was willing to spend the rest of his life trying.

'It'll be fine,' he told Klaus.

_We'll be fine._

His quiet, confident words touched Klaus.

The anxious creature between them curled up and tried to settle, though it wasn't completely assuaged. It would take another week, and a small rose-engraved ceramic vase, for Klaus to properly come to terms with his new life.

He found himself thinking about the last time Taki had come with him to the west.

'Shame about the train line,' he said, sounding a bit more like himself. 'I'd have loved to see you pull another stunt like you did before. Stopping the train just so you get on board. Very dramatic.'

A brief smile flashed across Taki's face that Klaus had to be quick to see. He had to fight the urge to reach for Taki's hand, aware they were only a few feet away from the driver.

The airfield came into view, with rows of tails and wingtips visible in the distance.

'Ah, well,' Klaus continued, his anxiety temporarily giving way to an excitement he hadn't felt in a long time. 'This exit is plenty dramatic anyway.'

* * *

It began in the form of a careless joke on the day Meiji visited Klaus in the Royal Hospital.

As the heron outside picked the newspaper clean, Meiji prepared to bid the captain a final farewell.

'If there's anything I can do to express my gratitude for what you did in Eurote,' he added. 'Please don't hesitate to ask.'

Klaus' grin made the attendant nervous.

'Anything, huh?'

Perhaps it was because Klaus was still caught up in the flow of their humour that he answered so flippantly.

'Actually, an airplane would be neat,' he said, saying the first absurd thing that came to mind. 'I mean, don't go all out. Doesn't have to be a Beaufighter or anything. Just, you know, whatever you have lying around.'

The attendant internalised a groan over the foreigner's apparently inexhaustible supply of irreverence.

But the emperor, of course, had smiled.

'I'll see what I can do, Captain,' he promised. His tone and expression gave every indication that he was simply playing along.

Klaus had laughed.

* * *

A few days later, a valet was sent from the Imperial Palace to the Reizen property, bearing a message for Captain Wolfstadt.

Taki, in the end, had to convince him to keep the _Sagi_. Klaus' utter shock and abashment at having been gifted with a brand new, single-engined, twin-seat light aircraft due to an inane joke left him feeling entirely new shades of surreal guilt.

He had been adamant about refusing to accept until Taki explained how much of a slight that would be.

'You can't refuse a gift from the emperor,' he explained as though stating a simple fact.

He seemed almost amused by Klaus' red-faced astonishment. Klaus wondered at the possibility that Taki and Meiji had discussed it behind his back.

In Klaus' hand was the small photograph that the messenger had delivered from the capital. It depicted the _Sagi_  sitting on the tarmac, awaiting Klaus at the nearest airfield. Along the bottom of the photo, there was a handwritten message from the emperor himself that echoed the words of a defiant, flustered kitchen maid.

_'Because you asked nicely.'_

* * *

The timing couldn't have been more perfect, what with Taki's momentous decision and the fact that no trains would run between east and west for a long time.

Once again, as Klaus and Taki left the car and walked over to where the plane waited, he couldn't help feeling as though it was all a huge conspiracy that would come crashing down around him.

Those misgivings evaporated as they drew up alongside the _Sagi_. She was painted an elegant shade of ivory with no embellishment apart from the orange crysanthemum emblem of Meiji's house on the tail, as well as the name with which she had only recently been christened.

 _'Heron,'_ Klaus said with a broad grin as he reached up to touch the fuselage. 'I swear, that Meiji-sama...'

Once the airfield workers had loaded their things on board and handed them goggles, Klaus nimbly hopped onto the wing and offered Taki his hand.

And Taki's feet left the ground of the east for the last time.

* * *

Klaus smiled at the sight of Taki sitting in the passenger seat in front of him, his hair falling and flapping over the strap of his goggles.

Just as Klaus powered up the engine and felt it thrum through his entire body, an echo of a very old conversation came to him from across the years.

'Taki!' he called over the roar.

Taki twisted around.

'Ever flown before?'

After a brief pause, Taki shook his head, cheeks flushed and dark eyes shining.

Klaus' laugh was loud and golden and incredulous. There it was, finally. The one thing his prince hadn't done.

'You'll love it,' he promised.

Beneath them, the _Sagi_ ruffled its feathers and stretched.

They soared until they were nothing more than a glint that pierced the sky and disappeared on the other side.

 

**END**

**(of Part 2)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE on author's note: Can't believe I forgot to make a note on Taki's big decision! It was something I've been planning for so long that it almost went without saying for me, but obviously it would have come as a shock to most readers. I completely understand if you found it seemed implausible or out of character. I wanted to frame it not in terms of Taki finding it easy to give up his duty but rather in terms of his finally choosing the one thing that was more important (with Klaus' most recent brush with death being the final straw). But please feel free to let me know if you disagree/have a different view - I love a good MR discussion!
> 
> Re Taki's big decision, I also partly drew inspiration from Taki's sense that he was always searching for something, which I mentioned in Chapter 37. I mostly saw that [in this page of the manga](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-14-15.html/44/). Taki's vague restlessness helped me envision and strengthen his willingness to leave everything behind for Klaus.
> 
> Also regarding ACTUAL MANGA UPDATES: I had a note on here about a new volume of the manga coming out by the end of this year, and another one coming out by next April. My bad, everyone - apparently that was an announcement for Thorn Crown updates NOT actual manga updates. I am such a fool. I apologise for getting everyone's hopes up! I blame wishful thinking :'(
> 
> Back to original author's note:
> 
> ***
> 
> [Cries quietly over the fact that it's finally finished, while my dog watches on in concern...]
> 
> Hello everyone and thank you SO MUCH if you just reached the end of Part 2 with me! I really hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Even though the story is already much longer than I intended (more words than HP and the Goblet of Fire!!!), as you know there's still a whole Part 3 to go.
> 
> Part 3... that's a can of worms I'll open properly in a preface, which I'll put up as Chapter 40. Stay tuned for that. For now I'll focus on Part 2.
> 
> Here are some things I refrained from commenting on over the course of the last few chapters:
> 
> True story: Tachibana Junior took care of Taki's sisters when he went to Luckenwalde. Also Yura, the eldest sister, became a priestess. Headcanon: love affair between Yura and Tachibana Jr. Also I named him Douman (even though I'm pretty sure it's a last name) because his face reminded me of a character in Inariya-sama's other manga, Hari no Hana.
> 
> True story: the vast majority of Japanese people don't express 'I love you', or any real variation thereof, to their romantic partners, even spouses. It was something I gathered during my trip to Japan which, along with other things, inspired me to keep writing.
> 
> In my story, I've made it a symbol of the constant underlying issues in Klaus and Taki's pairing. I hope you put up with the never-ending ups and downs, I know it really tests emotional endurance lol. Like I said before, whether you agree with my interpretation of their characters or not, I would love to hear your take on it!
> 
> There were two asterisks in the previous chapters. The one in Chapter 37 leads to [a panel in the manga](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-14-15.html/45/) where a man/creature/man-creature (werewolf?) holds a dying woman. It's a part of a motif that occurs throughout the story and something I've always found disturbing and beautiful.
> 
> The asterisk in Chapter 38 takes you to what is probably [my absolute favourite drawing of Klaus and Taki together](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/maidenrose/images/e/e4/Tumblr_ltwtrcQ9NI1qmdvkzo1_500.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/346?cb=20140330231859), which is why I fleshed it out into a full scene. I find myself staring at that picture much too often lol.
> 
> Also something occurred to me while I was writing the epilogue. Taki might have gotten Klaus a horse, but Meiji got him a plane. So... I'm thinking Meiji might have won there, haha.
> 
> And finally, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everyone for their amazing support and love while I was writing. Words can't express how much it meant to hear from you - it made it so easy for me to start each new chapter! Your reactions and opinions and insight and theories and just straight-up love for our boys is inspiring and wonderful. Special mention, as always, goes to Hanairoh who has been this story's soulmate since they met under the wisteria tree all the way back in February haha (thank you my dear!)
> 
> I'll see you in the Part 3 preface. Until then, thank you once again everyone, and I really, really hope you enjoyed :) Xx


	40. PREFACE to Part 3

Hello again, everyone!

I can’t believe we’re actually on the cusp of Part 3! I know it’s 200,000 words and 10 months on, but for some reason it still feels like it happened way too soon lol! I can’t thank you enough for having followed the story this far!

Okay, now for the BIGGEST WARNING OF ALL TIME.

First of all, I know I gave a similar warning before Part 2 explaining that I would understand if people chose not to follow the story (and omg thank you for sticking around anyway!!! You're all amazing). But that warning was only for those who were sick of updates or looking for an ending as emotional relief. Part 2 was at least imaginable(ish) as canon.

Part 3 is not.

Part 3 is pretty much one long, non-canon blasphemy.

Part 3 is barely _Maiden Rose_ and mostly Dionys going rogue.

Part 3 opens with something terrible and then, during later chapters, slowly and painfully proceeds to explore an extremely non-canon pairing. And I don't hold back on the angst/pain/suffering at all. To have an idea of what to expect, please consider Taki’s letter to Klaus in the prologue, which I hope was a strong enough warning left way back when. In summary, Inariya-sama would hate me.

But, in a totally messed up way, Part 3 is also my favourite part of the whole story and something I've been looking forward to for a long time. It’s really the only reason Parts 1 and 2 happened at all.

And to be fair, there is, in fact, a very specific canon basis for the rest of the story (I mean it’s _mostly_ me going rogue, but it was definitely inspired by the manga). Part 3 is where I finally get to resolve the issues I’ve always seen in Klaus and Taki’s pairing, even if ‘resolve’ isn’t necessarily the best word to use.

It’s my little experiment on characters; on compatibility and happiness. It’s something that I would love to hear your thoughts on as the story progresses, even if you disagree wholeheartedly. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to challenge how you view certain characters by putting them in a new light, but hopefully while maintaining what’s wonderful about them.

Regardless of your feelings about Part 3, I hope it doesn't affect how you felt about everything that’s happened so far. The response I got for Parts 1 and 2 was completely unexpected and overwhelming and I'm constantly grateful whenever I think about it. Thank you so much for being a part of that! <3

UPDATE: I originally wrote this preface before I began writing Part 3 and I was riddled with uncertainty about how it would go down. Now that I've finished the whole story and I know how it feels to see it written out in full and to hear feedback from my wonderful readers, I'm far less hesitant about the final chapters.

The warnings above do still apply, but now I feel stronger in my hope that more readers will join me on the journey, even the ones who are hesitant about it. The amazing, open-minded readers who stayed with this story through Part 3 despite their initial uncertainties mean the world to me, and they're the ones to whom I am most grateful.

So I humbly urge any newcomers to continue, despite any misgivings you might currently have. I hope you enjoy. Thank you again for reading, everyone, and for all your love! Xx

 


	41. On His Skin, and Deep in His Bones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember everyone, from here on, it's barely _Maiden Rose_ and mostly Dionys going rogue. Hope you enjoy anyway! We're getting closer to the prologue. Xx

**PART 3 : HARUKI** _  
_

   
_ROSKILDE, ALMOST EIGHT YEARS AGO_

At first, it was nothing more than a flash of light.

The train and the farmlands beyond were filled with a brash light that reminded Taki of the magnesium light used in photography.

It had the immediate effect of silencing everyone in the carriage, including Hasebe and the telegram operators.

Taki blinked and moved closer to the window. He saw only more of that strange light glazing the wheat fields and drowning out the glint of the distant water tank and even the far-off mountains.

He suddenly remembered the golden eyes of the wolf and the fire that consumed the world.

* * *

Years after the disaster at Roskilde, Taki was woken from a dream that seemed like both a memory and a premonition. He sat with Klaus in their rose garden at midnight, both wrapped in the diamond-patterned quilt from their bed.

The very next day, it started.

Even though summer was sliding into autumn and steadily dragging the temperature down with it, that day the sun burned down on them without any cloud cover.

With the bulk of the harvest over, there wasn’t a great deal left to do. Only a few workers dotted the fields, gathering what little remained.

Klaus always found he was easily hypnotised by the steady rhythm of hand-picking. There was an art to the bending, scything and tossing. The pack on his back grew heavier with each infinitesimal weight that was added.

Taki was working further up the field near the road, his pack almost full. His dark hair shone in the midday sun, a rich obsidian that made the golden fields seem insubstantial by comparison. Klaus smiled at his quiet focus, which he could sense even from far away. He remembered how Taki fell asleep against him on the bench the previous night. Klaus had been guiltily happy over the prospect of carrying him to bed. But Taki had awoken when Klaus tried to lift him and insisted that he could walk. Then they had returned to the bedroom. And then -

He tried to think of other things. Even after all those years, sometimes even a casual look at Taki from the other side of a wheat field was enough for him to have wayward thoughts in broad daylight.

His hands returned to work. After a while, he noticed he had flicked his hair out of his eyes a few too many times. It occurred to him that it was hanging too low over his forehead. A quick touch confirmed it had grown a bit too long behind his ears. Probably time for another visit to Gustav, the town barber and ageing bachelor.

Grinning, he imagined how Gustav would ask pointed questions as he wheeled Klaus in front of the mirror, as though the man knew exactly the kind of relationship Klaus and his master shared and their words were masked by innuendo and good humour only so the unsuspecting patrons nearby would have no idea what they were talking about. Afraid of how Taki might react, Klaus had always kept these mischief-riddled conversations with the town barber to himself.

Those who knew them in that small community, including the workers on that field, all cast Klaus and Taki's living together in the form of a bond they didn’t understand – one that was forged under the alien customs of the east – and speculation ended there. So Klaus could never be sure how much Gustav knew, or whether he had in fact intuited anything at all. Despite this, for Klaus, the old barber's presence in that little town was a sort of relief. Validation, almost, in a very small way.

He was in the middle of imagining a future where such conversations wouldn't have to be coded, a future that seemed implausible even as he tried to conceive of it, when he heard a small thud. Or perhaps he felt it in his feet, even though Taki was far away.

Whatever the case, it made him look up.

Taki wasn’t where he had been standing moments earlier.

'Taki?'

Perhaps he had already gone over the slight incline in the land so Klaus couldn't see him. Or perhaps even crouching low on the ground to pick something up; the stalks were tall enough to conceal a fully grown man.

But a sense of dread overcame Klaus nonetheless. He waded through the field, stalks clinging and holding him back as though trying to protect him from what he might see.

The spilled pack of harvested stalks. And the dark hair splayed between golden strands.

_'Taki!'_

Klaus' pack hit the floor and he knelt beside Taki's still body. He had fallen forward so Klaus turned him and lifted his head. His body felt heavier than normal. His skin was clammy.

Two images flashed across Klaus' mind in quick succession; their night-time drill in Luckenwalde when he had lifted Taki in the exact same way after he had been knocked unconscious. And the memory of holding the lifeless body of one of his men after they were shot down over enemy lines.[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-23.html/15/)

Before that same fear had time to set in, Taki let out a small grunt and opened his eyes. He stared up as though mildly surprised.

'Klaus?'

For Klaus, the relief was almost as heady as the momentary panic. His pulse still hammered as Taki unsteadily lifted himself to a sitting position.

'Are you okay?'

'What happened?' Taki asked blearily.

By then, the other men had wandered over, worried about why Klaus had yelled.

'I was going to ask you that,' Klaus said, reluctant to let go.

'I don't – I don't know.'

Taki looked up into the faces of the workers and felt vaguely embarrassed for having caused a fuss.

'I'm fine,' he said, trying to get back on his feet and understand what had happened. 'I think I just... passed out.'

Klaus stared.

'Probably from – from –' Taki stammered. 'The heat.'

One second he was staring across at the dirt road, remembering the first time he had seen the golden fields and how he had felt as though he had been there before. And then the world tilted on its side and rushed to his head and he had blacked out.

He got up with Klaus' help and felt thoroughly humiliated by his moment of weakness. But even as he stood upright, he felt the world start to swim again. Like there was a strange viscous liquid in his head making it hard for him to find his balance and his focus.

The crown of his head felt warm. Surely it was the heat.

‘Did you hit your head? When you fell?’

‘No, I don’t think –’ he said falteringly, trying to avoid looking at Klaus. 'I'm fine.'

He reached for his fallen pack.

'Like hell you're going back to that,' Klaus said, taking his arm. 'Go inside and rest.'

'I'm alright.'

'You collapsed.'

'Only for a second. I can keep working.'

'Nope.'

'But –'

Klaus pulled him back towards the cottage as the others resumed the picking. Taki managed to convince him that he was alright to go in alone. He went on ahead and tried to walk slowly enough so as not to lose his balance but not so slow that Klaus would get worried and follow. He felt Klaus watching his every step until he was out of sight.

His pulse returning to normal, now more bemused than worried by what had happened, Klaus turned and picked up both his and Taki's packs.

As he worked, he was lulled once again by the rhythm of the harvesting. The image of his dying comrades slowly lifted up out of his mind like the sun had drawn it out and set it adrift on the wind.

* * *

Taki lay on his side on top of the covers and squeezed his eyes shut. The darkness behind his eyelids swam until he lost his sense of direction even when lying still. Though it was hard to admit it to himself, he was relieved that Klaus had forced him back inside.

That day had been easily the worst episode yet.

Over the past few weeks, he hadn't once mentioned any of his dizzy spells to Klaus. It had begun innocuously enough; a little lightheadedness when he rose from a crouch in the vegetable garden or swooped and straightened to help with the harvest. He had cut back on kendo practice a few times when the dizziness set in after a few minutes of exertion. He almost started to get worried when it happened even when he stood at the kitchen sink, doing very little.

But in each case, the spells were over almost as soon as they began. He decided it was the latent heat of the summer or perhaps the cumulative effect of a diet that had changed significantly in the seven years he had been in the west.

Imagining Klaus' overreaction, and perhaps, deeper down, due to his fear that Klaus would think of him as weak in any way, Taki kept it to himself. He had filed it away with all those things, large and small, he hadn't been able to tell Klaus over the years.

His prudence had been rewarded when weeks passed with no further incident.

And then, from out of nowhere, he had collapsed in the middle of the wheat field. In front of Klaus and a half dozen workers. The humiliation made him curl into himself again. It was small as far as humiliation went but it had cut him to the quick. He tried not to think about the look on Klaus' face when he had come to.

The curtains were drawn and the room had taken on that pleasant mid-afternoon dimness that Taki loved. He breathed in sandalwood and dust and the faint scent of Klaus on the sheets. The smell of home.

The darkness was still spinning behind his eyelids, lurching back and forth, by the time he drifted off.

He awoke without any real sense of how much time had passed. The light was more or less the same but the smell of Klaus was stronger. Klaus’ arms were around him and his warm breath gently disturbed the top of his hair. Despite the heat, Klaus was pressed close, still and silent, like he had been there for years.

Held like that, with no room to move, Taki found the room was no longer spinning.

He turned slightly to look over his shoulder. Golden eyes, dimmed in the low light like the last embers of a fire. Eyebrows slanted as though frowning, a fierceness brought out by the scar, but all of which was offset by a wide, gentle smile. Taki noticed that his hair was getting long.

It occurred to him then that Klaus' face had changed subtly over the long years since they met in Luckenwalde. There was a more defined solidity in his jaw. Or a certain firmness in the line of his mouth. Nothing Taki could put his finger on, however. He wondered if he himself had changed too.

‘Feeling better?’ Klaus asked.

Taki nodded.

After searching his face, Klaus was mostly reassured. Behind the drowsiness of sleep, there was a familiar alertness in Taki’s eyes. None of the dazed lack of focus Klaus had seen out in the field. His young master was okay. He exhaled slowly.

‘You scared the shit out of me for a second.’

Taki turned his head back.

‘I’m sorry.’

Klaus kissed his shoulder through his shirt and tightened his hold. For a moment, there was just Klaus’ slow exhale and his lips on Taki’s ear. Taki suppressed a shiver.

‘We could see Mrs. Fritz tomorrow. She might be able to tell you if something’s wrong.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Taki, his voice breathier like Klaus had flipped a switch. ‘It was just the – the heat.’

Klaus’ hands palmed Taki’s chest. There was a familiar urgency in the way he pressed his lips to Taki’s neck.

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

A sting of teeth.

‘Where’s –?’ Taki’s head starting to spin again but for a wholly different reason. ‘Where’s everyone else?’

Klaus was blindly feeling for the buttons of Taki’s shirt and undoing them.

‘I sent them home,’ he said. ‘Without you out there, things fell apart. There was too much to do and we were flailing. It was bedlam.’

Taki had already turned his head in surprise by the time he realised Klaus was joking. Klaus smiled.

‘We were done in less than an hour. They asked me to make sure you were okay.’

Another small stab of embarrassment.

‘I’m –’

‘Yeah, yeah. You’re fine.’

He had undone the last button and peeled Taki’s shirt away. A hand ran up his chest and neck and stopped at his jaw, which was tilted to the side so Klaus' mouth could find his.

Klaus then turned Taki to him fully and kissed Taki’s neck, warm from his nap and infused with the smell of something no human being had any right to smell like. He pushed Taki backwards until they were right on the edge of the bed and Taki’s hair fell over the side.

And there, suddenly, the dizziness found him again. It wasn't the kind that Klaus inspired. It was the kind that had pulled him to the ground in the wheat field.

Taki squeezed his eyes shut again, certain that Klaus would notice. But he didn’t.

Holding his face in both hands, Klaus lowered his chest to Taki’s and ground his hips between Taki's legs. Taki arched his neck and let out an exhale that was close to being a moan. He was struggling to regain control.

‘You sure you’re fine enough for this?’

Klaus’ tone carried its usual devilish inflection, like the flick of a tail. And Taki was on the point of telling him no.

But there was something else hiding in Klaus’ voice that only Taki knew how to read. He looked up and saw a small part of it reflected in Klaus’ eyes. An old fear. One that had silently haunted Klaus since the first war.

_‘I held him in my arms as he died.’_

Klaus had spoken those words softly by the light of their campfire in the clearing. Taki hadn't said a word since Klaus began the story and, afterwards, he had felt a terrible hollowness. The war had stripped Klaus bare. There was almost nothing left of him after that.

Taki had wondered time and time again how Klaus had come back from that. He was awed by Klaus’ silent strength. By the fact that Klaus had ever found a reason to smile again. Or fly again. Or lie there with Taki like that, during that peaceful summer afternoon.

The idea that Taki had anything to do with it – with Klaus’ ability to put it all behind him - made him feel both undeserving and humbled. And he had taken responsibility. Klaus was his knight. Klaus was his. Every part of him. Every side to him.

And so, despite the way the ceiling behind Klaus’ head morphed in and out of focus, Taki assured Klaus, yet again, that he was fine.

And he let out his first proper moan when Klaus bent down to take Taki’s nipple between his teeth.

* * *

When Taki collapsed again a week later, he didn’t wake up. Even when Klaus held him to his chest and called his name and felt the faintness of his pulse.

It was the first day of autumn and Klaus thought he heard something strange in Wolfsbane’s high, forced braying which he could hear all the way from the bedroom where he had only just woken up.

The horse had been known to kick up a fuss when a fox was lurking nearby, so Klaus didn’t think much of it at first. But when he noticed there was no sign of Taki anywhere in the house, the neighing drew him down the back steps.

In the stable, Taki was lying on the floor beside the bale of hay he had been loosening for Wolfsbane. The horse clomped about nearby, never close enough to put Taki in danger but clearly anxious at the sudden lifelessness of one of his masters.

When he refused to wake, when he only seemed to get heavier in Klaus’ arms, Klaus’ fear and confusion and disbelief threatened to spill over.

That was the moment something took hold of his heart in a pointed grip, the talons cutting in deep. It felt ancient and gnarled, like the root of an evil plant that had waited for years before sprouting. It took hold of Klaus then, in that stable where Wolfsbane harrumphed in agitation somewhere over his shoulder, and it refused to let go for years and years.

Before he knew it, he had put Taki in the back of the truck and taken off down the dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust hovering in the middle of the golden fields.

* * *

Klaus' fear had taken over to such a point that when Taki stirred and murmured his name from the backseat, he had to stop the truck in the middle of the road to catch his breath. To let that icy fear ebb from within and allow him to see clearly again. The talons that had dug into his heart and throat didn’t let up, however.

They couldn't ignore it any longer. Something was very wrong.

He twisted around in his seat. Taki was trying to sit up, once again looking clammy and dazed and weak.

‘Klaus –’

‘What the _hell_ is going on with you?’

A voice that was entirely too loud. Klaus heard the words as soon as they left his mouth. The fear had translated to anger and he saw how it made Taki flinch.

‘I –’ Taki began uncertainly.

A loud honk from behind them jolted Klaus to the present. He had stopped directly in the middle of the narrow road and another truck was struggling to inch past. Klaus made a noise of frustration and pulled over to let them pass. Once the truck rumbled away, they were left in total silence, if not for the pounding in Klaus’ ears. The dark, comforting green of corn stalks pressed against the windows.

Klaus remembered how heavy Taki had felt. Heavier than he ever remembered.

He turned around in his seat again. Taki was watching him warily, as though he was more worried about what Klaus might say than about what had happened to him.

‘Are you –?’ Klaus began, trying to get his thoughts in order. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ Taki replied quietly.

He tried to sit up and but was worried it would make everything spin again and that Klaus would see it happen that time.

‘This morning, I –’

Taki remembered placing the bale of hay before Wolfsbane and beginning to pull it apart. The horse had clopped over slowly. And then everything had whirled and blinked out like a light.

He stared at Klaus and tried to explain.

‘I just… passed out again.’

‘That part was pretty fucking clear.’

Taki stared.

‘Klaus –’

‘You didn’t wake up,’ said Klaus, and Taki’s heart thudded painfully at the tone in his voice. ‘You didn’t wake up. I tried but you were completely knocked out. Taki…’

There was a strained pause at the end of which Taki carefully tried again.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing. It was probably –’

‘You can’t blame the heat again. It’s barely fifteen degrees out.’

‘I feel fine now. Really.’

But Klaus was only thinking about Taki’s pale face when he was unconscious and the way his lips were parted slightly as though surprised.

He made up his mind and put the truck in gear.

‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’

_‘Klaus!’_

The truck pulled back onto the road and picked up speed much too fast.

‘I know a doctor there who used to look after Claudia. He’ll see you without an appointment.’

Taki realised Klaus was talking about the next town over, which was more than an hour’s drive away. His resolve hardened.

‘Klaus, stop the truck. You’re overreacting. I don’t need to see a doctor.’

‘I’m not –’

‘Stop the truck.’

It sounded dangerously like a master’s command to his knight. Klaus felt the words tugging at him, pulling back whatever it was that was making him fly down the dirt road faster than he should.

‘Klaus –’

‘Taki, just… just do this for me, okay?’

In the silence that followed those words, words that sounded completely removed from Klaus’ anger earlier, Taki didn’t know what to say.

He sat up properly. The spinning had all but gone away. He felt foolish and embarrassed. And ashamed to have brought out that side in Klaus, however briefly, after it had lain dormant for so long.

But the change in Klaus’ voice had plucked a string. It recalled old traumas and wounds, gained both in the first war and the second and over Claudia’s illness. And Taki was left with no choice.

He let out a sigh Klaus couldn’t hear.

‘At least slow down,’ he said softly.

Relieved, Klaus glanced at him once in the rear-view mirror. He lifted his foot very slightly off the accelerator.

The talons loosened but refused to let go.

* * *

And they tightened progressively over the course of the next two days.

First Taki was sent from general admissions to a different department. Then another one after that. X-rays were taken and analysed on the spot. Blood was taken and would be analysed in the days to come.

Drawn faces and neutral faces and optimistic faces and combinations of all of the above. From murmured reassurances to outspoken realism to reluctant pessimism. Taki faced it all and only heard one bottom line that rang aloud. He would have to stay overnight.

Roskilde hung like a shadow over the course of that day even though Taki only mentioned it once, to the very first doctor, Dr. Hesse, who made a note of it with a face that betrayed nothing. But that single word was what had propelled him from department to department.

They had heard over the years about its legacy. Things that no one had seen before and things that kept cropping up. Taki knew it and Klaus knew it but they had never paid it much attention. After all, Roskilde hadn’t left a scratch on Taki.

Taki remembered the flash of a million suns. And the heat that stung his eyelids. But there was no more than that.

They had escaped. They had left the war behind. They had left everything behind. There was no way the gods would allow something so obscene; not after everything else they had been through to get there.

By the end of the day, the situation had become surreal enough that Taki had managed to float above it. He was reminded of an almost identical day spent in hospital in Roskilde after the disaster, when he had been perfectly fine and he knew he was perfectly fine and he had withstood hours of tests thinking only about his need to get to Klaus until finally the doctors gave him the all-clear.

So he waited again for the all-clear.

And Klaus waited with him. He had refused to go back home and his face seemed to carry the gravity of something Taki felt was far-fetched and unrealistic. He tried to think of the moment when Klaus' fears would be allayed and they could drive back down the dusty road to the cottage.

He was placed in a room with another patient separated from them by a curtain. Quiet sobs were heard throughout the night. Klaus couldn’t be sure they came from the patient or his visitors. There was gentle murmuring between the sobs.

On their side of the curtain there was only silence. Taki slept and Klaus kept watch.

He found himself talking to old gods from the west he never believed in and new gods in the east he also never believed in. Not even when he heard Taki’s voice call to him in the middle of battle or from beneath the rubble and floor in an abandoned farmhouse in No Man’s Land. Not even when Taki had told him of Hans Regenwalde and his gift.

But now, without even believing, Klaus found himself praying.

* * *

The following morning dawned bright and cold. It was only the second day of autumn but it appeared to have come a long way since the first.

The patients with whom Taki had shared a room weren’t there any longer. Neither was Klaus.

In his few minutes of solitude, Taki reflected quietly on the grey, surreal, fluorescent-lit day that had just passed. One that had placed him front and centre in a way he had willingly embraced as shogun and commander but one that, in this situation, had left him feeling humiliated and grisly. It wasn’t him. And it wasn’t Klaus to be the large, hulking presence in the corner from whom worry leaked almost tangibly. None of this was them. And Taki was eager to return to who he was.

He hadn’t had another episode during his entire stint in hospital and in fact had slept quite soundly. He hoped for good news before he was able to go home.

A nurse appeared, drew another blood sample from him and said he could go ahead and get dressed; the doctor would be in to speak to him and he would most likely be discharged by the end of the day.

His heart lifted. Even though he had always known there had been nothing to worry about, his relief was still substantial. He could already imagine Klaus’ haggard sigh and his cursing the summer heat and his declaration that perhaps this was a sign Taki should try eating meat for the first time in his life.

Taki was sitting on the edge of the bed buttoning up his jacket by the time Dr. Hesse arrived, clipboard held at his side.

The doctor’s hair was completely white, his coat shabby and his fingers perpetually stained with the cigarettes he would light in the middle of consultations. He was known throughout the hospital for his frank and rather brutish bedside manner, which Klaus had dealt with before in the form of unsparing reprimands about how much he had let Claudia get up to while she was recovering.

Hesse stopped before Taki and seemed to consider him for a moment. It was a tense pause that Taki didn’t quite understand.

‘How’re you feeling?’ the doctor then asked, entirely unexpectedly.

The blunt, gruff tone to which Taki had grown accustomed over the course of the past day had suddenly dropped into something that was almost tender. Taki’s insides turned cold.

Hesse then fumbled for something in his pocket.

‘I’ve sent Klaus for coffee,’ he said, without waiting for Taki’s reply. ‘Nice of him to be here and everything, but I thought it was best if you heard this alone.’

The iciness began to spread from Taki’s gut. The doctor fished out a cigarette and lit it before he drew a chair up to Taki’s bed. He sat heavily, took a deep drag on his cigarette and looked Taki in the eye.

* * *

_AT THAT SAME MOMENT, IN THE EASTERN CAPITAL_

In the large office adjoining the Throne Room, Emperor Meiji sat still with his face in shadow. He sat at a handsome mahogany desk set against the expansive back window where he had signed new laws and treaties into effect and forged new alliances all over the world.

Natsume stood by the desk. His mouth had fallen open several minutes ago and he had forgotten to close it. His gape was directed at the two men who were also standing, having refused to take a seat when their emperor offered.

They were Tachibana and General Saigo Nakamori.

Minutes earlier, when the emperor’s courtier entered the Throne Room with news of their unexpected arrival, Meiji took a second to process.

Tachibana, who had caused so much trouble at the beginning of Meiji’s reign. Accompanied by the Minister for Defense. A sense of foreboding fell on the emperor in the same way that it fell on Klaus when he went back into the hospital room and saw the look on Taki’s face. After they had been completely searched and disarmed, Meiji had received them in his office with only Natsume beside him.

He listened to what they had to say without interrupting even once.

The silence that hung in that room afterwards was similar to the one that preceded Tachibana’s phone call. The call that had placed a small explosive device on a train bound for Roskilde and the west. It was the kind of silence that decided the fate of empires.

Seconds stretched and morphed and ticked away. Meiji remained still. Almost passive.

Tachibana finally spoke.

‘You might not be tired of this nation being at everyone’s mercy,’ he said, his tone measured but somehow concealing a volatile undercurrent. ‘ _You_ might not be tired of how many times we've been threatened by all sides. By Eurote, by the west. But I’m tired of it. I don’t want to face the shame of running to Eurote the next time we’re in trouble. I want us to be a force to be reckoned with, like we were in times of old. I want us to be able to hold our heads high.’

‘And you think _this_ is how to do it?’ said Meiji slowly.

Even Natsume felt the chill that emanated from his voice. The steely contempt. The emperor's eyes were narrow and sharp and sliced through his visitors like blades.

‘In any case, we didn’t come here to argue. We’re here to deliver an ultimatum. Either –’

‘I’m having trouble deciding.’

Another small, confused pause.

‘That’s –’ Tachibana said, a rare note of hesitation in his voice. ‘That’s why we’re giving you until the end of the day to make the announcement.’

‘You misunderstand,’ Meiji returned, his voice still low and dangerous. He had barely moved a muscle since he sat down. ‘I’m having trouble deciding whether you’re simply desperate for power or if you truly are capable of such astounding ignorance.’

The lines were delivered with a deific wisdom that seemed impossible to refute. Tachibana was thrown yet again.

Unbeknownst to both him and Nakamori, Meiji had decided as soon as he heard the nature of their threat. He knew when his hand had been forced. He knew he didn’t even have a choice to make.

‘Alright.’

Tachibana blinked and exchanged a quick look with Nakamori.

‘Alright?’

‘I agree to your terms,’ Meiji said, his voice so quiet that the others strained to hear. ‘You’ll have your announcement by the end of the day.’

There was no tangible relief from the two men who stood before his desk. Only a certain stillness as they processed the fact that their plan had, at long last, worked.

‘I’m glad you’re seeing reason. After a week, we’ll expect the transition to take place without incident and you can tell your –’

That was when Meiji finally rose from his seat.

‘In light of our discussion, I can understand that it slipped your mind,’ he said, his voice once again setting the others’ teeth on edge. ‘But I’ll remind you that I am still the emperor of this nation, even if my time will end shortly. In the interim, you will watch your tone when you speak to me. You will sit when your emperor offers you a seat. You will think twice before you ever tell me what I can expect. You will still refer to me as Your Majesty. And, regardless of what you’re threatening me with, you will leave this room and these grounds as soon as I am finished speaking, or I will tell Natsume to shoot you where you stand. Is that perfectly clear?’

A final silence fell. It appeared to Tachibana and Nakamori, who would soon be the most powerful men in the east, that they quailed beneath the silent power of he who was being dethroned.

After they left, only Natsume saw the way Meiji sank back into his chair, seeming like only half the man he had been when he had been standing.

The emperor found that he was thinking about the promise he had made to Klaus von Wolfstadt in a courtyard in Eurote.

_There’s nothing honourable about war. No matter why it’s waged, or how. As long as I have the throne, there won’t be another one._

He wondered if he would be forgiven by grace of the fact that, in the strictest sense, he had kept his promise. He just didn’t foresee that he would have to give up the throne only seven years after he had been entrusted with it.

And then, out of nowhere, he almost laughed. It occurred to him that after all that time, Natsume was still the temporary head of his Imperial Guard. He hadn’t found anyone to fill the post. And now it appeared he never would.

* * *

The only legacy of war. Violence even after the violence was over. Death even years after the fighting had stopped.

Taki had escaped it all in one sense. But in reality, it stayed with him like it stayed with every soldier who thought he escaped war. In the form of his constant memories of how close he had been to death and especially how close Klaus had been to death. It stayed with him in the form of his constant paranoia of peace.

And it had stayed with him on his skin. And deep in his bones.

And it had struck with the silent vengeance of the gods.

Klaus didn’t say anything on the long drive home. Taki thought the silence would surely kill him. He fought for something to say but was hemmed in by the aggressiveness of Klaus’ silence.

It was dusk by the time they arrived at the cottage. They had remained at the hospital for several hours to hear the results of further blood tests, all of which sang the praises of the doctor’s initial diagnosis. To Taki’s relief, given the sporadic nature of his symptoms, Hesse had allowed him a few days to himself. Before he returned to the hospital for the long haul.

_Long haul._

Klaus’ mind was flinging between a set of words that sounded like they came from a different world. Words like _transfusions. Therapies. Chances._

 _Late-stage._ How far it had eaten away without their knowing over seven years.

 _Estimation._ The obscene amount of time that was left. A number that almost made Klaus laugh out of shock.

And above all, there was Hesse’s reply when Klaus asked a question that sounded like it came from a child.

_We can’t say why. Why it affects only some who were there that day and not others. We just can’t say, Klaus. I’m sorry._

Klaus was in the kitchen automatically stowing away dry dishes by the time it occurred to him that the past few hours had gone by not in terms of each independent action he had taken but in terms of the thoughts whirling around his head.

He barely remembered the shocking news out of the east that he and Taki heard on the car radio. Emperor Meiji’s announcement that he would abdicate the throne by the end of the week barely made a dent in Klaus, even though he saw Taki turn his head sharply.

He barely remembered pulling up to the cottage or getting out. He knew Taki had hovered nearby before leaving him alone in the kitchen. Klaus heard sounds of him speaking on the phone. Probably calling Uemura and Ogura and the palace itself to confirm what he had heard on the radio.

Klaus wondered about the timing. A simultaneous strike. He knew that if it weren’t for what had just happened, he and Taki would be on the first train to the east. Now, it was as though there was nothing that mattered less to Klaus than the thought of Tachibana taking the throne.

Taki’s muted words floated through to the kitchen. Klaus drained the sink.

Aside from their silence and Klaus’ inability to look at Taki, it was almost like things had gone back to normal. None of it had been real. Klaus lifted a stack of plates into the overhead cupboard.

And then it came at him like a shot in the dark. His own voice. His own words uttered years ago in his utter, enveloping arrogance.

_If the gods really are keeping score and they're planning to come after you eventually. Let them come. They won't get through me._

The first dish that shattered was completely by accident. A small bowl slipped from Klaus’ hand as he moved it and broke apart on the floor with a tinkle that was strangely delicate. Tiny shards raced off across the flagstones.

‘Klaus? Are you okay?’

Klaus heard his voice and even his footsteps approaching the kitchen. He even automatically held out a hand to stop Taki from coming closer in case he stepped on a sliver of porcelain.

But really, his mind was on something else. The maiden rose that was broken. The maiden rose that _he_ broke. A crime punishable by death.

Of course Taki had pushed him away. Of course he had struggled against Klaus’ insatiable, violent, sinful hunger for years. On some level, Taki must have known.

And the gods had kept score.

It was Klaus’ fault.

It was all, all of it, his fault. Everything he touched –

And so he picked up another dish from the draining board and let it fall to the floor.

* * *

Taki’s heart was rent one stitch at a time as he watched Klaus silently and systematically break every dish and glass within reach.

It wasn’t done out of anger, which scared Taki even more. There was a deadly precision to his actions. A deliberate care with which he picked up the next dinner plate or drinking glass or mug and simply dropped it.

A small mosaic of shattered porcelain and china and glass began to take shape on the flagstones.

Each time something fell and shattered, it left a sound that Taki heard and felt somewhere deep. He didn’t dare say a word.

The only time Klaus’ veneer of calm destruction broke was when he swept an arm liberally over the kitchen table, taking out everything that was on there; things that fell softly and things that splintered.

When he was finished, he went outside.

* * *

Klaus walked to the far edge of the garden and then found he had to sit and so he sat on the grass. He was suddenly thinking of colours. The colours of the roses. The colours of the wisteria. And he was thinking of how he had seen Taki dance as a child. The lavender robes whirling and his blue-black eyes fierce and poised. He remembered what he had thought that day, at the tender age of fifteen. _Now that my world has been repainted by something like this…_

And then he was thinking of the second time he had been knighted, when he had grasped Taki’s robes in his hand and the sun flooded the pier and the lake behind them had sparkled. And Taki had smiled down at him.

_Now that my world has been repainted by something like this, how am I supposed to fill the rest of my days?_

‘Klaus?’

The last time Klaus’ rage had taken over and he had sought the refuge of the garden, Taki had let him be. This time he followed. He followed and drew up to Klaus and knelt by him and touched the side of his face and tried to find him again.

Taki held him as he wept and wondered why he couldn’t find tears himself.

They sat on the floor by one of the rose hedges for a long time. The happiness of the past seven years seemed like it had been bundled up and cast aside.

‘I think I broke it,’ Klaus said finally, his voice unsteady.

‘Broke what?’

‘The vase you made.’

Taki needed a few seconds before he was able to picture the slender vase that had remained on the kitchen table since their very first week at the cottage.

He didn’t know whether to be confused or relieved.

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can… make another one,’ said Taki, still slightly confused and hearing the stupidity of his own words.

Taki was sitting against the brick wall and Klaus leaned into him. Into the smell that he couldn’t distinguish from the flowers.

That day – a day which had seen Klaus’ ashen-faced silence in the hospital and his glowering silence on the drive home and his terrifying, destructive silence in the kitchen – was the first and last day Klaus would ever keep Taki at arm’s length. From then on, he poured himself into Taki. He would do everything in his power to make sure Taki emerged unscathed from this like he had with everything else. Taki would be fine.

Taki would be fine.

Because after almost thirty-four years, the only thing Klaus knew for sure was that there was no point in his remaining in the world if Taki left it.


	42. Life, Everywhere

_ONE MONTH LATER, IN THE MIDDLE OF AUTUMN_

It wasn't a bullet catching Taki in the chest. Or a shell landing and tearing Murakumo apart. Or Taki dying at the hands of the enemy in an abandoned farmhouse in No Man's Land. It wasn't even the blast in Roskilde decimating the train.

Here, the gods were punishing Taki in a way Klaus couldn't reach. With tiny, invisible armies that were waging a war somewhere both agonisingly near and far. Taki slipped from him even as Klaus held him. Klaus sometimes caught himself staring at his own bare hands and wondered at their uselessness.

Taki slipped from him even as Klaus held him. Even at their closest, Taki was always far away. It had always been like that. How fitting it was. How fitting, Klaus would think, when he allowed himself to slip into the spiral. How fitting. And how senseless.

* * *

Klaus walked through the front door and paused for a moment. He was briefly taken by the sensation that he was seeing the cottage for the first time. It was as though the bare brick walls and rafters and even the furniture was regarding him with a silent omniscience. Like they had been observing everything for years and were now offering their silent sympathy.

His grandfather had died in that house, Klaus remembered suddenly. He had left behind only a collection of ceramics and a pottery wheel and a rose garden. He had told Klaus and Claudia of the Wolfstadt curse. He told Klaus that perhaps he would be the one to find it. The scent of the rose.

Klaus had found it.

And now –

Klaus banished the thought and began to move about the house. He packed new clothes for himself and Taki. He collected a few things from the ice box and pantry. He watered some of the sturdier plants that had survived on the sill and threw out the less fortunate ones, along with some apples that had begun to shrivel. He ignored the talons that maintained their grip on his heart; a sort of constant, physical, pointed grip that he had simply learned to live with. He wondered whether he should try carting the gramophone all the way to the hospital to lift Taki's spirits when he awoke to another bad day.

He thought back to their first week in the cottage, when he had waited for it all to be whipped out from beneath him. His paranoia had been vindicated, despite being eight years too early. Eight years too early, like the conviction that had gripped him once in a hospital in Eurote. He knew the blast in Roskilde had killed Taki. He had known it in his bones.

But he still didn't let himself give in. Not completely. Their paranoia of peace had been vindicated, sure, but that bones-deep conviction in Eurote wouldn't be. Not while he there was still breath in Taki's body.

He noticed a jar of homemade rose jam lurking in the corner of the pantry and tossed it into the bag.

Casting an eye out the kitchen window, he expected to see fallen brown leaves and unmown grass. He was mildly surprised to find it looked better than it had two weeks ago when he had last seen it. Clean, cropped grass and not a single leaf in sight. He blinked in confusion and also realised the garden looked like it had been weeded and the fence replaced.

A board creaked suddenly behind him. Klaus jumped and turned. Even though he hadn't seen anything close to combat in years, his hand flew first to his hip.

Rudi stood in the doorway to the kitchen holding a greasy axle, startled first by the sight of Klaus and again by Klaus' reaction.

'Goddamn it, Rudi,' Klaus exclaimed with a short exhale. 'If I still carried a gun, you'd be on the floor.'

Rudi's eyes widened and he looked like he wanted to take a step back.

'Sorry.'

The front of Rudi's shirt was stained with dark patches of grease. His skin was even more tanned than usual after the summer that had just passed. Nervous blue eyes. Klaus almost smiled.

'I was kidding,' he said, trying to use their ridiculous moment to spark his some of his own humour back to life. 'I'm not that trigger-happy. Wouldn't shoot anyone by accident. Not a second time, anyway.'

The joke sounded and felt hollow. And, if anything, it made Rudi look even more nervous.

'What are you doing sneaking into the place?'

'I didn't know you'd be home.'

'That's not helping your case.'

'I – I've been taking care of…'

Rudi fumbled over his words. It was a particular kind of nervousness that had only marginally improved since his teenage days and was exacerbated around Klaus, whom Rudi had always viewed as an intimidating older brother.

As Rudi gestured with the axle, Klaus came to understand how the lawn had been cropped.

'I've been trying to help with things, but the mower wouldn't start today. I went back home for spare parts.'

It turned out that Verner, with whom Klaus had left Wolfsbane, had grown worried about his neighbours' extended absences over the past month and sent his son in to take care of the place where he could. Even though Klaus was obviously grateful to hear it, Rudi noticed that Klaus' smile seemed tired and didn't quite reach his eyes.

'How come the lazy old gaffer isn't doing it himself?'

'He's been sick. Early flu, he said.'

_Sick._

A muscle in Klaus' jaw twitched and he looked away. He glanced at the bags of food and clothes on the kitchen table.

'Could you give me a hand to the truck?'

'Okay.'

As they left the kitchen, something occurred to Klaus.

'Any sign of Ori?'

'No.'

'Figures.'

Once out front, Klaus noticed for the first time that the bundles of wheat had been gathered near the combine. He wondered how much else Rudi had done around the place. Rudi saw him looking across the field.

'I had a look at the combine,' he said. 'It's broken again.'

'That thing's as temperamental as the cat. It's been messing with us ever since my idiot of a brother-in-law bought it.'

'I'll try to fix it.'

Klaus looked at him and tried to remember how old he was. He remembered the gangly kid who had blushed when he first laid eyes on Taki.

'It's good of you to keep an eye on the place,' he said. 'Taki'll be happy to know someone is.'

The mention of Taki's name made Rudi glance up. In the past month he'd seen Klaus come and go but never his young master.

Watching Klaus load the bags onto tray, Rudi was reminded of the day he had helped Taki salvage groceries from off the floor beside that same truck. That was the night the sheriff's son had tried to intimidate him. Rudi glanced at the long scratch along the body of the truck. Years down the track, he still felt as though he had let Taki down that night.

He struggled for a few seconds as though daring himself to ask.

'Is he –? Where is he? Taki, I mean.'

Klaus' pulse picked up. He turned to face Rudi.

Similar to their unspoken decision years ago never to speak of Hans after Klaus had left his body on a mountainside in No Man's Land, Klaus and Taki had silently decided that they would keep Taki's illness to themselves. It was as though neither of them yet had the courage to surrender so fully to their new circumstances. No one had been told; not the Reizens nor the Strausses nor their neighbours.

But standing before Rudi, with his open, honest face and grease-stained shirt, Klaus wondered if it was finally time.

'He – Taki's…'

_Carry me to where those flowers grow._

The talons squeezed a little harder.

'Taki's sick,' he said.

It was the first time the words had taken shape outside of his own mind. Klaus felt them slip out of his grasp. They were no longer his to control.

'Oh.'

Rudi was relieved. He had been worried Taki had returned to the east for good. He pictured his father heartily devouring potato soup in bed and griping about his temperature.

'I hope he gets better soon.'

He wondered why the short silence that followed was suddenly so strained and awful.

* * *

Taki thought he understood pain. After what Hans had done to him – the gunshot wound, the arm that was sliced open, the three days of captivity in a small wood-panelled room in No Man's Land and the pain of recovery – he thought he had experienced the worst the world had to offer on that count.

Over the past month, he realised just how wrong he was.

The disease claimed him both gradually and swiftly. Gradually because the pain came and went, leaving him with good days and bad, similar to how Claudia had coasted in and out of her symptoms long ago. But swiftly, too, because there was a sudden and merciless onset of new symptoms. As though the dizzy spells had been benign heralds of so much worse to come.

He learned to dread the small throbbing in his temples, because he knew it was only a matter of time before it blossomed into another splitting headache that lasted hours.

Sometimes, his limbs and eyelids and lips were all too heavy to move. The extent to which he had been drained of energy shocked him.

Worst of all, there were times when his bones were on fire. It went beyond, it _surely_ went beyond, what a single body was capable of producing or enduring.

In times like that, he would hold onto the large hand that was always there on the edge of the bed and try to keep still and pray for the dizziness he had once dreaded to wash over him and send him back into darkness again.

The only thing that kept him going, and the thing that made everything a thousand times worse, was that Klaus never left his side.

On good days, Taki sat up and even got out of bed and walked slowly with Klaus around the room or down the hall. He listened to Klaus' stories about communications from the Fifteenth Armoured Division and tried to process news from the capital itself where a new emperor reigned. Klaus would try to tone down reports of the mysterious circumstances under which Meiji had abdicated. He didn't want Taki to worry about anything that was taking place outside those hospital walls.

The room in which Taki stayed for over two months, where he received shots and blood transfusions and was pulled in and out of the new depths of pain concocted by his body, was alright as far as hospitals went. It was a private room overlooking a town that was much larger than the one in which they lived and which bustled and fell quiet with the regularity of the tides. When Taki was well enough to go to the window, he spied, off the distance, the blue sparkle of a lake he had once visited. He couldn't see it but he could picture the barn-turned-jazz-club nearby where Klaus had danced with Heidi Reinhart.

Their extended stay reminded Klaus of the Royal Hospital where the heron that had christened his airplane stalked among the rushes and where the plump, pretty nurse would come in to check on the state of his face and chest and Klaus cajoled her into admitting that he was easily the most handsome man she had ever seen, even with the scar. On one of Taki's good days, Klaus told him of that conversation and his anxieties lifted, for a split second, when it elicited a small smile.

But in time they learned those good spells were almost worse than the bad. They learned that hope could be a terrible thing. It made each new flare-up that much harder to bear.

And so Taki learned to understand the temporariness of both the good and bad. And beyond that, he understood the temporariness of everything. It seemed to him as though the life he had lived itself was only temporary. A raised bump against the flat, black expanse of nothingness. And he was soon to return to that nothingness. It seemed almost peaceful; as though life was the aberration while nothingness was the norm.

These moments of philosophical enlightenment were few and far between.

Most of the time he was scared.

He had heard of people recovering from the atomic bomb disease. But he also knew they were those whose symptoms had been merciful and shown up a lot sooner than his. Radiation therapies would have worked on them, where they would have little to no effect on him. So they hadn't even tried.

The numbers Hesse had told him on that first day – chances for recovery and the time he had left – had never once stopped echoing in his head. The ruthless, unfeeling mathematical reality of it was hard to comprehend, let alone accept.

Two of his eight months were gone.

His blood count kept dropping. His symptoms worsened to the point where treatment wasn't even providing temporary relief. He could only lie still and grip Klaus' arm and ride it out until it ebbed or until he passed out.

Towards the end of the second month, Hesse quietly told Klaus there was no point in continuing treatment.

So Klaus took him home.

* * *

It was hard for Taki to believe he had once been so fit that cadets and soldiers and officers alike had lined up to try their hand at defeating him at the Fifteenth Armoured Division. Or that he had single-handedly taken down an entire roomful of bullies in Luckenwalde. Was it really only months ago that he had hiked up the side of the waterfall and walked for over an hour to find their secret clearing? Had he really raced Klaus through the river to the curtain of water and almost beaten him despite Klaus' headstart? Was it possible he had defeated Klaus three times in face-to-face combat?

His whole life, he had been taught that strength was everything. While he no longer thought of himself as a pillar for his people, and far from a god in human form, he still remembered how Klaus had looked at him when he was Commander.

He had felt a surge of something deeper than pride when Klaus watched him move tanks and entire armies with a single word. He even remembered the first time he had fought alongside Klaus when the dogs bore down on them in Luckenwalde. How the strength of Taki's resolve had sparked that excitement and admiration in Klaus' eyes.

_Give me your words, Taki, and I will turn them into a sword to eliminate anything that stands in your way._

He insisted that he didn't need help walking, even when every step was agony. He insisted that he didn't need help dressing or eating. He could never get used to being Klaus' burden.

And, on his good days, Taki couldn't help but notice that Klaus hadn't kissed him in a long time.

Though Klaus would stare at Taki's face and hold him and brush the side of his mouth with his thumb, he would almost always refrain himself from kissing him. Or touching him in any other way.

It made Taki feel like he was too sickly even for Klaus to want him like that, which in turn was nothing more than another subtle shade of pain.

* * *

He didn't know that Klaus was in a constant battle with himself. His hunger for Taki hadn't abated even slightly. If he could suspend Taki's illness and pain, he would have torn Taki's clothes from him with his teeth and devoured him whole, no matter how thin and weak he was.

But ever since the first plate slipped from Klaus' hand and smashed onto the floor, the blame began to seep into him, filling every crevice, until he could no longer distinguish himself or his thoughts from the guilt of what was happening to Taki. It was blame that lurched from the rational to the irrational to the worldly to the esoteric.

Sometimes it took the form of what had actually happened. He ought to have been there. He never should have gotten on the plane with Meiji. He was safe and sound in Eurote, being fired on by inexperienced rebels and catching the flak of a minor bridge explosion, while his master was alone at Roskilde.

If he had been there. If he had been there on that train, he could have… perhaps he could have… if he had thrown Taki to the ground and held him there… it might have –

It might not have made a shred of difference. But then again perhaps it might have.

And the blame bubbled up in other ways. Even when desire surged, he couldn't see past the guilt of knowing his desire had destroyed Taki in the first place. While Taki longingly recalled Klaus' words to him in the heat of battle, Klaus remembered Suguri's cold words that conveyed the burden of a whole nation.

_Is your hunger the reason why you plucked our rose?_

He had pulled Taki down from divinity.

He had buried the rose in the soil and carried that guilt.*

He had learned nothing from his youth.

* * *

The rest of the year saw a steady influx of arrivals from east and west and even Eurote. Some stayed for only a few days, others for weeks. Some of the arrivals overlapped, allowing Claudia to meet Sumi and for Heinrich, barely thirteen years old, to briefly meet the one with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

The Reizen daughters arrived at the start of winter.

At fourteen, Midori Reizen was already a striking beauty. Deep blue eyes, delicate lips and obsidian hair that flowed to her impossibly slender waist, she arrived in a flurry of robes and colours and sweet perfume that made Klaus recall swaying purple flowers.

'Look at you,' said Klaus warmly. It had been two years since the girls had visited.

'Klaus-chan,' she said with a smile, having held onto the diminutive _'chan'_ after Klaus insisted. She was already at the gate before Sumi and their attendant had a chance to get out of the car. 'You need a haircut.'

'You always know what to say to make this old man feel better.'

'You're not old, Klaus-chan,' Midori intoned, with a bewitching roll of the eyes. 'But you do need a haircut.'

Then her smile flickered somewhat.

'Is Onii-chan…?'

Her question trailed away.

'He's in the bedroom,' Klaus told her quietly. 'Go on in. He's awake.'

Her smile was back for a moment, small and sad, before she went into the house. Sumi embraced Klaus with tears in her eyes.

Chiyeko and Hebe would arrive the following morning, along with Yura who had left her young son in the care of her husband, Douman Tachibana.

They stayed for a whole month that winter, by which stage four of the eight months had already flown by. They quietly celebrated Taki's twenty-eighth birthday.

* * *

Klaus always busied himself when visitors first arrived. He couldn't bear the first few minutes of their seeing Taki.

He didn't want to see them hide their shock at how thin he was; like he had been whittled down to nothing. He didn't want to hear either the hushed tones or forced cheerfulness. He preferred to return to the room when enough time had passed and the conversation had returned to some semblance of normality. He did so when the Reizens arrived and again when Claudia arrived with Eva and Heinrich and, to Klaus' surprise, with Wilhelm, who had taken time off work just to make the trip.

Taki, however, always approached these greetings, strained though they were, with that same quiet grace that had served him well his whole life and hadn't left him yet.

There was an overlap of a few days between the Reizens' visit and the Strausses. East and west came together and the cottage was fuller than it had ever been.

It felt like a surreal interlude when Taki sat on the front porch, bundled up in layers to fend off the cold, and watched as Heinrich showed Midori how to lead Wolfsbane around by the reins over the snow-laden road. He even managed a smile when Rudi accidentally brushed past Midori on his way back from the combine in the distance and Midori scrunched up her nose at his stained overalls; a moment's interaction that caused Rudi to blush deeply.

Life, everywhere, Taki thought.

An hour or so after the Strausses arrived, Wilhelm and Klaus crossed paths between their trucks and the front door. Wilhelm abruptly paused in front of Klaus. He clapped him on the shoulder and fixed him with a look that spoke volumes. Then he went inside, leaving Klaus to stare after him.

Despite Taki's anxieties, no one, not even Wilhelm, spared a second thought about Klaus and Taki sleeping in the same room.

* * *

One afternoon, Klaus spied Taki and Claudia speaking together in low voices on the porch. Heinrich and Midori's cheerful banter coasted to the cottage from further up the road where they were still leading Wolfsbane.

Klaus was impressed at how much Claudia had kept emotion out of her words and gestures since she arrived and focused entirely on tending to Klaus and especially Taki. He felt a wave of gratitude that she was there. For all the things she and Taki were able to share by dint of her own illness that Klaus simply couldn't understand.

So he left them and went into the kitchen where Eva had taken on the task of making snacks for the whole party, Reizens and Strausses alike.

Eva's hair was cut short in a way that reminded Klaus of his own mother. But her demureness and seriousness was all Wilhelm. Happily, she and Midori had become fast friends despite their difference in personalities.

Fifteen now, Klaus thought. He recalled what he had been up to at that age.

'Got yourself a gentleman caller yet, Eva?'

A flash of reproachful blue eyes.

'Please,' she said. 'All the boys at school are loud and obnoxious.'

'So they're like me, huh?'

'Yes, pretty much,' she said curtly, but with a smile in her voice.

'What kind of boy are you looking for, then?'

'I don't know. Someone quiet. And kind. An actual gentleman. I'd like to find one before gentlemen go out of fashion, anyway.'

'So someone like Taki?'

A small pause.

'Maybe.'

Another pause where their attempt at light-heartedness trickled away and reality set in. Eva's knife paused for a moment.

'Ori isn't here, is she?'

Klaus picked up one of the fruit skewers she had carefully prepared and leaned against the counter. He tried to work up an appetite.

'No. Sorry, I know how much you love that little vixen.'

Eva seemed to hesitate. 'It's not just that.'

Her tone made Klaus glance at her.

'Ori… Ori goes away when things are bad.'

Klaus stared. 'What?'

'I noticed it over the years,' she said, her look making it clear that she was aware of how it sounded. 'First she left when Mama got sick. And then she was gone when the war took Papa away to work in the mines.'

Klaus wondered whether someone else had taken over his rational, intelligent niece who had always been wise beyond her years.

'And then she left before we moved, like she could tell we were unhappy about it.'

'Claudia said you and Heinrich were excited to move to the city.'

'We told Mama that for her sake. But we never wanted to leave. It's like Ori knew. She leaves when things get sad.'

She had disappeared only a few days before the diagnosis. Klaus felt something unpleasant settle in the pit of his stomach. He'd had enough of religion and superstition to last a lifetime.

'Eva –'

'But she comes back when things are happy. Remember how she came back after you and Taki arrived for the first time? To take care of Mama? And she came back again when you and Taki moved into the cottage for good.'

Klaus considered her in silence.

Eva offered him a nervous, beseeching smile that tugged at his heart.

'She might still come back, Uncle Klaus.'

Her words and everything they meant still echoed in his mind when the Strauss family packed up to leave a few days later. By then the Reizen daughters had also returned to the east.

Taki was in the bedroom, having succumbed to a terrible chill that morning. Not wanting the others to see him like that, he urged Klaus to leave his side to bid them farewell by himself.

Claudia held Klaus for a lot longer than necessary and Klaus fought back a surge of despair.

'I'll come back,' Claudia said, drawing away and wiping her eyes. 'I'll come back when you need me. Okay?'

Klaus knew she was talking about a day three months later when he would call and she would come because she couldn't bear the thought of her little brother being alone when it happened.

According to Hesse, it was a day in the middle of spring that would take Taki's life.

* * *

_TWO MONTHS LATER, TOWARDS THE END OF WINTER_

Taki lay awake in the small hours, feeling the onset of another awful headache. He heard Klaus' steady breathing behind him and hoped he could keep it together enough that Klaus wouldn't have to wake. But in no time, the headache became something more. It pressed at the walls of his head, pulsing and expanding. Demanding release. Taki let out a small grunt of pain. He moved further away from Klaus.

He hadn't heard Klaus laugh in weeks. That golden, booming bark of a laugh was gone and nothing seemed to revive it, not even when Claudia told him of how similar Heinrich was to Klaus at that age, in light of the latest stunt that had nearly gotten him suspended; riding his bike down a flight of steps in school on a dare.

Though nothing made Klaus laugh, he still smiled often, for Taki's sake. Even then, each smile he gave Taki or the Reizen daughters or his sister or niece and nephew was a shadow of what it used to be. It was no longer the smile Taki had eve been able to hear through headphones in the heat of battle. He wondered whether Klaus would ever –

He let out another soft moan when his bones began to ache and sear and light up.

The sound woke Klaus. He wrapped his arms around Taki without a word. Taki turned to him and tried to fill his head with Klaus' scent. But the throbbing and the searing wouldn't let him.

_I held him in my arms as he died._

'Klaus…'

He wanted to tell Klaus to run. To go far away and leave him to his own pain and his own end, because he knew that it was something Klaus could never recover from. He dreamed that he would wake up one day and Klaus would be gone, as would the _Sagi_ , and there would be nothing left but a note on Klaus' pillow. He dreamed and despaired and prayed. Since the beginning, he had done nothing but bring Klaus pain.

 _Run,_ he told Klaus silently, tears stinging his eyes. _Leave me. Please._

And he pressed himself against Klaus and held on.

Assuming the tears were from the pain, Klaus held Taki's head to his chest. He murmured promises into Taki's hair, his voice breaking, because there was nothing else he could do. Promises that flew in the face of what was happening before his eyes.

'Nothing's going to hurt you. I'm not going to let anything hurt you.'

Taki gripped the front of his shirt.

'I'm never letting you go,' said Klaus.

It was the only real promise he could make. And, though he didn't know, it was the one that scared Taki the most.

* * *

The eight-month mark loomed. It was a weight that had tilted their whole year, their whole lives, downwards. A mark towards which they had been sliding, grappling at everything they could, which amounted to nothing. As the mark approached, Klaus put off the call for as long as he could; the call that would summon Claudia.

The eight-month mark lingered on the edge of their vision.

Then, all too soon, they were upon it.

* * *

And they passed it.

* * *

And another month passed after that.

There came a morning when Taki awoke first, which hadn't happened for a very long time. His head and limbs didn't feel as though they were being pressed to the bed by an invisible force. He took in deep breaths that didn't hurt.

 _Temporary_ , he told himself, lest his spirits soar too close to the sun.

He then turned to see Klaus asleep on his back, mouth slightly open, with Ori asleep on his chest.

And suddenly he was there on a day eight years ago. Little Eva had run to him and declared that Ori was back and was sleeping with Klaus. Taki had allowed himself to be pulled by the hand into the rose garden that was flooded with sunlight. Klaus lay asleep on the garden bench, resting after an afternoon of chores under the glaring sun, with one leg hooked over the armrest and Ori curled up on his bare chest.

The only thing that distinguished that morning from the memory was the fact that Klaus was still fully clothed.

Klaus awoke to the feeling of a warm weight on his chest. He stirred and blinked. And lifted his eyebrows.

'How the fuck –?'

He reached up to scratch her head. She was deeply asleep. Klaus realised she had been gone for over half a year; her longest absence yet. Klaus glanced at Taki.

'I don't remember leaving any windows open. Do you?'

Taki shook his head. Klaus stared at the cat. A ball of pure white with strange dark marks on her back and tail.

'What _are_ you?'

And when Taki leaned over to stroke Ori's fur with the back of his hand, Klaus remembered Eva's words.

He knew it was during moments of weakness that the mind was susceptible to nonsense; things like religion and superstition. But he couldn't help it. It had been almost two months and he hadn't had to make the call to Claudia.

That afternoon, Taki sat in the living room reading through a backlog of telegrams. There was a faint pounding in the base of his skull and he still needed a moment before he rose from bed or the couch. But he had eaten a huge breakfast and felt light and was able to see everything as though he had emerged from a tunnel. The thing that was eating him away from the inside already, deceptively, seemed like a bad memory.

'It doesn't make sense,' said Taki. 'Meiji wouldn't abdicate on religious grounds.'

'Yeah, no shit,' came Klaus' voice from the kitchen where he was making jasmine tea. 'I don't think the guy ever believed in a single god.'

It was a strange moment for Klaus who realised the eastern gods now scared him more than they scared the former emperor of the east.

Taki read over the details of the speeches and press releases.

_'I believe I no longer am fit, in mind or soul, to lead the people of this great nation. It is with a heavy heart that I resign the throne. I have every faith that the Tachibana house will serve our people with pride and dignity.'_

Though there was still rampant speculation, the papers concluded that perhaps his purity as the Son of Heaven had been compromised. Popular opinion was divided about whether his voluntary abdication in light of this possibility was honourable or whether it was Meiji evading harsher penalties.

Either way, not long after the transition, Meiji had disappeared from the public eye.

His supporters, however, remained. A huge swell of them he had gained over seven years.

And their suspicions and outrage grew silently.

Taki tried to piece it all together in a living room far in the west and his head swam a little. Too much had happened in the wide world over the past nine months for him to catch up in one afternoon.

'Enough,' Klaus said, taking the latest missive out of his hand. 'Don't tire yourself out.'

Klaus placed Taki's mug of tea on the table, stood in front of him and felt his forehead.

Without being conscious of it, Taki leaned into his touch. Klaus' hand.

Klaus' hand.

'You're burning up a bit. I'll get the compress.'

He removed his hand as he stepped away. Taki took it.

Klaus stopped and turned. There was a flush in Taki's cheeks Klaus hadn't seen for a long time. Klaus' pulse surged dangerously. They were at the compound again, both nearly a decade younger, and Taki pulled his hand under his chin right after, and right before, they held one another against the curtain.

'Taki…'

Taki heard the reluctance in his voice, a reluctance that was so unlike him, and dropped his chin.

Even though he had gained back some of the weight he lost, he was still thin. He was still frail and dependent and pallid. There was nothing about him anymore that Klaus could possibly –

And then Klaus tilted his face back and met his lips in a kiss. A knee on the couch. Hands running firmly but gently over his arms and neck. And Klaus' scent everywhere.

It was a moment of hope that stretched into a whole, cruel week.

* * *

Klaus ignored Hesse's warnings that Taki had climbed into a plateau that wasn't uncommon. He ignored the near certainty that everything would fall away and plunge even deeper in the relapse. He let his spirits lift with each new day that Taki seemed a little better. By then, the damage had been done.

Klaus had hope.

He reminded Hesse of how Claudia had recovered completely despite the odds. Hesse tried to explain the magnitude of the difference between their conditions, but it was as though Klaus couldn't quite hear it. He would hold onto any kind of hope; even false hope.

Taki, however, absorbed Hesse's words quietly.

* * *

The descent, when it began again, was slower than before. But it happened. And the second time, Klaus lowered himself into the abyss beside Taki without any resistance. His arrogance, it appeared, wouldn't be tempered no matter what the situation. And in every situation, it always came around with a vengeance.

His emotional exhaustion found its own plateau. Despair and hope became one and the same.

He came into the bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, Ori on his heels. Taki asked him to close the curtains most days. There was something about the dim afternoon light that he seemed to enjoy.

Taki looked so small lying on his side. Klaus went to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. He ran a hand gently through Taki's hair. It had lost its silky feel. His scent was faint.

Taki stirred and awoke.

'Sorry,' Klaus said.

A soft sigh and Taki turned onto his back. Ori sprang onto the bed, light as a feather. She had been the final, irrational little thread of hope. And Klaus had let go.

'Do you need anything?'

Taki slowly shook his head. His eyes were glazed again.

Klaus suddenly remembered how he had imagined Taki as an old man, glasses-bedecked, poring intently over harvest forecasts. Grief clawed anew at Klaus' heart and throat. But, with a skill he had acquired silently over the months, he ignored the talons and powered on.

'I was just in the garden. We forgot to pick the roses this spring, remember? There's way too many now. It's a little overpowering. And there's new ones growing all the time.'

Life, everywhere, Taki thought again.

And in fact, that was the day that Taki would see life again in a new light. In just a few hours, there was to be one more arrival who changed everything.

'What do you want to do today?' Klaus asked softly.

Taki turned to him, fighting to focus on his face. The golden eyes that were like anaesthesia. He tried to make his mouth form words but he was too tired. He visualised the garden as Klaus had just described it.

He found it was easier to lift his hand than to speak.

Klaus understood and wordlessly took Taki's hand, like he had done once a long time ago.

_Carry me to where the flowers grow._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The reference to Klaus burying the rose in his youth comes from a few DJs, including the beautiful little piece called _Lupus et Flos_. I couldn’t provide a link because I couldn’t find the DJ itself online. But there are YouTube versions of it set to music, so please have a watch if you haven’t already, it made me cry the first time.
> 
> Also, to lift everyone’s spirits, I thought I’d repost an original drawing I did months ago for the wonderful Hanairoh (after whom Ori the cat is also named). The memory of this little scene brought Taki a brief moment of happiness in this chapter, which was otherwise just dragged-out angst, so I thought I’d share it with you guys too! Hope you like :)
> 
> There was supposed to be a rose garden in the background but I got lazy and just borrowed some real orchids instead to set the mood lol! #dedicatedtothecraft


	43. He Appeared as if by Magic

The suspicions and outrage of Meiji’s supporters grew silently. But they were forced to grow ever more silent as the months progressed.

The same newspapers that liberally covered all aspects of the transition from Meiji to Tachibana suddenly found less and less reason to doubt the legitimacy of Meiji's abdication and more reason to speculate on a hidden scandal. The same newspapers also printed more and more in favour of the new ruler.

News reports on television and over the radio also saw an increase in support for Tachibana.

Izumi Shunsuke, journalist and former media liaison at the Fifteenth Armoured Division, noticed his editor sweating at the beginnings of meetings. He noticed a lot of his articles would get cut due to oversight.

He wondered, drily, whether they should start worrying about people disappearing in the dead of night; those who had loudly opposed Tachibana’s ascension to the throne. He grew restless and worried.

And he hunted down an address, which itself was only very reluctantly handed to him by the staff at the Reizen household, and sent a letter to someone who had long since disappeared from the east. He had heard rumours of the young former commander’s ailing health but he couldn’t help himself.

Irrational though it seemed, Izumi couldn’t help but feel as though Taki Reizen, despite his health, despite being so far away, might somehow be able to fix everything. He had won a war, after all, Izumi thought. If there was any divinity left in the world, he might find it there.

* * *

Klaus didn’t need to read Izumi’s letter to Taki to get a sense of what was going on in the east. Though Taki’s health had almost totally eclipsed the rest of the world, it was still impossible to ignore the talk on the radio and even on the streets in their little town.

_‘We have known for years that the west has been building their arsenal of nuclear technologies. The former government has made a policy of sweeping such realities under the rug. I, however, intend to address this threat head-on. The world must be made aware that the east will not lag behind and be made subservient to other nations. We will hold our own, no matter what it takes.’_

It unsettled Klaus, and the nations of the west, how words that seemed defensive on the surface could contain so much aggression.

The responses from leaders of the west were equally coded and equally threatening. Passive and guarded and cold.

Spies abounded. Foreigners were deported. Rumours caught and spread quicker than the facts could catch up.

Fear and mistrust grew first in corners, in the secretive world of politicians and defence, and then spread like ripples over entire nations.

Roskilde passed from people’s lips in a way that was somewhat scalding to Klaus. They were afraid of something which, to them, was nothing more than a headline. A theoretical danger. And in his home, in his bed, were the very real effects of that new threat.

He heard Tachibana’s voice from speakers in cars and through shop windows. As much as he wanted to, and as much as he knew he would have done if every part of him wasn’t dedicated to Taki, Klaus couldn’t hold down his anger at Tachibana for long enough to stretch it into the need for vengeance of any kind. It had been an accident at Roskilde, after all. Nothing but a volatile weapon tumbling and breaking in a way that nobody could have planned. No one to blame but the gods.

Which meant there was no one to blame but himself.

* * *

Being in the garden, which, as Klaus promised, was almost overwhelmed by roses that had grown unchecked, seemed to bring a bit more life into Taki that morning. He sat up on the bench without Klaus’ help and found he had the strength to reply at times when Klaus spoke. He was happiest when Klaus turned his face and kissed him gently, fingers lacing through Taki’s on the bench, like their first time at Luckenwalde.

Klaus, however, felt a stab of guilt. Kissing Taki had made him look even more dazed. He took a steady breath and drew away.

‘I’d better get a start on the harvest,’ he said. ‘They say we'll be rained-in for days.’

Taki sighed and said nothing.

Though the skies were still clear, forecasts predicted a storm on the horizon that would bring a cold front with it. The humid afternoon air was being whipped away by a cold wind.

In the living room, Klaus left Taki with tea and painkillers and a thick mauve blanket for his shoulders. Ori wound herself around Taki’s legs and purred.

‘She’s in a good mood today,’ Klaus observed.

Outside, the sun warmed his skin right through his clothes. If not for the forecast, the thought of rain wouldn't even have occurred to him. He thought of the way Taki's pale lips had felt against his. He had fantasised, for a brief moment, about peeling his clothes away and licking his neck and feeling Taki's heart beat beneath his palms. He wanted to invade Taki's body again with his fingers and tongue and cock until Taki forgot whatever else was inside him and he looked at Klaus like Klaus was all there was.

The first swipe with the scythe sent those thoughts scattering. Gold heads trembled and fell and he swooped them into the basket.

* * *

A solitary bird perched out of sight somewhere above the porch, keeping up a rich, throaty warble. Taki walked to the bureau set near one of the front windows, which he slowly opened without stretching his arms too far. He saw the stalks move in the distance. He saw Klaus moving steadily through the stalks.

He thought about the letter from Izumi Shunsuke, the man whose article had triggered Mussolin’s downfall. His reports, and his fears of the new emperor, had left a small ink stain of dread in Taki's chest. He thought of his sisters and their future.

But time and time again, his eyes and mind were drawn to Klaus.

And so, he brought out the same blank sheet of paper and placed the pen beside it.

Over the past few weeks, whenever he had been well enough, and whenever Klaus was out of the house, he had drawn that same sheet of paper before him.

Taki stared out the window, trying to feel the breeze. He could still hear the bird’s rich, sweet song but it didn’t land. It was singing of a future without him.

The sight of Klaus in the fields had once given Taki a deep, simmering contentedness. Now he only saw Klaus alone. He fought the guilt again, guilt that didn't pay any mind to rationality. He watched as Klaus plucked the stalks and swung them deftly into his pack. He then lowered his pack to the ground and stooped for a moment. His hair, Taki thought again, was the exact same shade as the field around him.

He picked up his pen and stared at the paper before him, again at a loss. What on Earth would he write? What on Earth _could_ he write?

_Klaus,_

_My knight._

_My knight._

_My knight._

The words wrapped themselves around his head. He couldn’t go any further than that. And if he did, the words that would pour forth were stinging and uncontrollable.

_I’m sorry, Klaus. I wanted to protect you. I wanted to shield you from any more pain because you’ve been through so much of it already. I brought you home to protect you from any further suffering and instead I brought you the worst suffering of all. I’m sorry._

_I’m starting to understand our curse. The one that has tied us together through all of our past lives. Our curse isn’t that we keep getting torn apart. Our curse is that we feel the need to be bound to one other. Our curse is that magnetic pull that goes beyond our bodies and makes us feel as though the weight of history and destiny are behind us. Our curse is that we keep finding each other, even if being together often brought us both great pain._

_I hate my pain for hurting you. I wish there was some meaning to all of this. I wish I could die knowing that you won’t be dragged under the soil with me. I wish I could –_

Words that he would never write in a million years. Words that would make everything worse even if he did write them. After a few pointless minutes, when it became clear that yet again he would lose to the page’s blank, white stare, Taki looked up.

And he saw the figure standing in the field before Klaus did.

* * *

A few seconds later, Klaus glanced up from tightening his bootlace to flick his hair away from his eyes. He started. Then he got to his feet.

Taki was standing a little ways from him, near the place where he had collapsed the first time, facing away as though scanning the road. Bizarrely, he was wearing his old jade army coat with the white trims. His hair and the stalks around him gently swayed in tandem.

'Taki? What are you –?'

He turned. A part of Klaus had known, even as he spoke, that it couldn't have been Taki. His hair was the darkest shade of brown, not blue-black. Besides that, he was too tall and toned, shoulders too wide.

When he turned, the similarities were still striking. He was quite beautiful. His eyes were same narrow slant as Taki's, though larger. Wider mouth. Stronger, more angular jawline.

'Klaus-sama.'

A deep, pleasant voice. There was something familiar about it. Something familiar about the hint of red that touched his cheeks as he approached. And on top of all that, there was only one person in the world who had ever called him _sama_.

‘Haruki?'

At the window, without realising he was doing so, Taki leaned forwards, unsure why his pulse had picked up.

Klaus blinked in the sunlight, wondering if he was seeing a harvest illusion.

'Well, fuck me dead.'

Haruki's flush deepened. He suddenly seemed to remember himself and hands went to his sides. He bowed low.

'I apologise, Klaus-sama, for my sudden intrusion. I know it's rude of me not to have given you any notice and –’

But he stopped because Klaus had let out a loud, golden laugh that carried to the cottage. Taki hadn't heard the sound in weeks.

'No, no, no. None of that.'

He stepped forward and pulled Haruki into a hug.

'Didn't they teach you anything? Division commanders don't bow to captains.'

Caught entirely off guard, just as he had been on a train platform long ago, it took Haruki several seconds to return the hug. Klaus pulled back and held him at arm's length.

'Good God, look at you,' he said. He felt, ridiculously, like a proud father. 'Were you really the kid who stood up on the back of my bike?'

'I – yes,' laughed Haruki a little nervously, overwhelmed at his nearness. Klaus was as huge as ever and smelled like sweat and hay. The only changes were his hair, which was slightly longer than Haruki remembered, and the golden scar stretching from the corner of his mouth to his temple.

'I hear congratulations are in order.' Klaus stepped back. 'Commander Yamamoto.'

'Thank you, but that's really not necessary. I haven't even been officially made –’

'It's absolutely necessary,’ Klaus insisted, eyes twinkling. 'And I see they're still nuts about that jade colour. Suits you, though.'

Before Haruki could reply, Klaus beckoned him towards the house.

'Come on in, Taki'll love to see you. You're a dead ringer for him, by the way.'

Haruki looked away in embarrassment. He had heard others make similar comparisons over the years.

Klaus watched him, still struggling to reconcile the man beside him with his memories of the glossy-eyed cadet.

'How old are you now, kid? Twenty-one?'

'Twenty-two.'

‘Barely in your twenties and about to become Division Commander, huh? Rings a bell.'

His eyes weren't piercing like Taki's, Klaus thought, unable to stop comparing in that moment. Haruki’s were gentler and more open. But there was still a sharpness in them that he didn’t have in his youth, and he moved with the kind of strength and fluidity that suggested he had grown into himself.

‘What are you doing out here in the west?’

‘I’ve just been in the capital with Lieutenant Azusa. He’s still there. Commander Uemura sent us on a recon mission.’

Words that recalled a former life. Klaus processed slowly.

‘Sounds like a long story.’

As they reached the front gate, a small detail suddenly came to Klaus from over the years.

'Still got my gun?'

Haruki laughed again, this time unselfconsciously.

'Yes, sir.'

'No kidding? After all this time?'

'Yes.'

‘I’m impressed.'

Haruki smiled and felt a familiar squirm in his gut. It had never once left his side.

* * *

'Look who I found wandering in the field.’

Taki pushed his chair back slightly when they came in.

‘Must have snuck up over the hill right when I was doing up my boot.’

'I couldn't see you in the stalks,' Haruki admitted. 'I wasn't sure if I got the right place so I was thinking about heading back into town and asking for directions.'

His eyes fell on Taki and he did an admirable job, Klaus thought, of keeping his shock to himself.

‘Taki-sama,’ Haruki said, his voice dropping only slightly. ‘I’m sorry for imposing like this.’

'That's quite alright.'

Klaus happily noted the small, warm smile on Taki’s face – one he hadn’t seen in a long while.

‘It's good to see you, Commander,’ said Taki.

Hearing Taki Reizen call him by his old title made another flush creep up Haruki’s neck.

‘I’m – please don't call me that, Taki-sama. I won’t be made Commander for a few weeks. I'm still only a lieutenant colonel.'

‘Only,’ Klaus scoffed. He leaned his shoulder against the wall and crossed his arms. ‘I’m the lowest ranking officer in this living room.’

Haruki sat when Taki gestured at the couch. He was still struggling to come to terms with Taki’s gauntness. He looked as though he might disappear at any moment beneath the blanket around his shoulders.

Taki, meanwhile, remembered the cadet who had been dropped unceremoniously into Murakumo in the middle of battle. He took in Haruki’s new silent strength. The new resolve in his expression.

‘So what brings you all the way out here, Lieutenant Colonel?’ said Klaus. ‘Something about Azusa and Uemura?’

Haruki hesitated. He had wondered how he might answer that question after he left his suitcase at the station and headed up the road towards the farmlands.

‘It’s a little hard to explain,’ he said. ‘And I’m not sure if –’

He glanced at Taki uncertainly.

‘Go ahead,’ said Taki, understanding his hesitation.

For a few seconds, Klaus seemed reluctant to let him. Even in the form of Haruki Yamamoto, he wasn’t happy with the idea of the outside world breaching their walls. But eventually, cautiously pleased that Taki seemed leagues better than he was that morning, a small sigh escaped him.

‘I had a feeling it would be a long story,’ he said as he pushed off the wall. ‘Tea, kid?’

Haruki glanced up. ‘Yes, thank you.’

Klaus called over his shoulder as he went into the kitchen. ‘I can still call you “kid” even though you’re my superior, right?’

Taki noticed Haruki’s slight blush.

‘Sure.’

* * *

Not long afterwards, the outside world slowly poured in.

‘We think Tachibana wants a war.’

The word was like a gong whose echoes Klaus and Taki still heard. Klaus placed the mugs on the coffee table and went to stand against the mantelpiece above the fireplace as Haruki spoke.

‘Commander Uemura isn’t sure why exactly, but he thinks Tachibana wants to prove our country's strength.’

‘What, winning the last war wasn't enough?’

‘Tachibana doesn’t consider the last war a real victory. He’s said a few times in his addresses that the west only saw defeat because of everything that happened with Eurote.’

Mussolin. His network of spies including Hans Regenwalde that had slowly worked to defeat the Western Alliance before turning around to double-cross the east. Klaus and Taki exchanged a glance that spoke of the darkness of those days.

It was a plot which almost saw Tachibana take the throne. And now, eight years later, he had finally succeeded.

In his low, steady tone, Haruki outlined the rest. How Tachibana dissolved the Nuclear Committee, halting diplomacy in its tracks. The spies he sent out that were stirring up all kinds of trouble. How the entire west was nervous, just as they had been at the start of the last war. Nervous about a strike from the east. Nervous enough to start funding new weapons research again.

‘I think we’re in trouble,’ Haruki concluded.

Another silence. Klaus glanced at Taki who had absorbed everything soberly. He suddenly wanted to tell Haruki to stop talking for Taki’s sake. But now that the outside world was in, it felt like he couldn’t turn it back just yet. Not when it all seemed so hopeless out there.

_There’s nothing honourable about war. As long as I have the throne there won't be another one._

‘Where’s Meiji-sama in all this?’

‘No one knows, not even Uemura. Meiji-sama sends us missives every now and then from an unknown location but he never reveals where he is.’

‘So we're supposed to believe he really had a spiritual awakening and ran off to some shrine in the mountains?’

Haruki made a face as though he agreed with the insinuation. There was a hint of worry in his features.

Klaus thought of half-lidded eyes and a light, ironic smile.

‘Can we be sure he's safe?’

‘We don't know, Klaus-sama.’

A small, foreboding silence.

Klaus crossed his arms again and leaned more heavily against the mantelpiece. He tried to keep his tone light. ‘So did you come here just to hand us this big basket of good news, kid?’

An apologetic flash of eyes.

‘We wanted to come, Azusa and I, because we wanted... to see you Taki-sama. He'll be here soon, he's still in the capital following up on some work. I went ahead. Date’s coming too from the compound. And Moriya’s coming in from Eurote. They'll be here in a few days.’

Eyes downcast, Taki managed a small, grateful smile.

‘Also, it wasn’t an order exactly, but Uemura wanted me to let you know. He couldn’t put any of this in a letter or telegram.’

Taki remained silent. His mind was again on his sisters. His people. Their future. They were heading for a struggle on two fronts. His nation never had to worry about civil unrest in recent history. It was more than they’d ever had to deal with before.

Klaus could see his mind whirring. He felt the need again to push everything away.

None of it mattered. Not anymore.

Haruki felt a wave of regret. Even to him, what was happening out there didn’t seem important, suddenly, compared to what was happening to the young prince in front of him.

And yet, something compelled him to keep talking.

‘There’s a good chance I’ll be in charge of the division during wartime for the first time since you were Commander, Taki-sama, and –’

_And I don’t feel ready._

Again, it was like Taki could hear what he didn’t say. After all, Taki had once been in that exact same place. He recognised the look on Haruki’s face. He knew what it was like to put on a brave face when inside there was nothing but self-doubt and the fear of failure.

Klaus, meanwhile, didn’t like where the conversation was heading.

‘You both have more experience in all of this than anyone else,’ Haruki continued somewhat gingerly. ‘You know both east and west, and you got us through the last war. Uemura thinks Tachibana might even be afraid of you....’

He was aware that it sounded like he was grasping at straws. He was aware that he had cast himself as the implausible stranger in this private little world, driven there only by his commanding officer’s somewhat naively optimistic notions about Taki’s health and his own guilty fears about the future.

But for Taki, hearing Haruki speak had sparked something in him. Something small but fierce which had also been triggered over Izumi's letter and the rumours coming out of the east. Even though he knew, rationally that his newly ailing body would never allow it, a three-day train ride suddenly didn't seem impossible. Nor did a few hours in the _Sagi_.

He felt that pull. That call. He looked at Klaus, wondering if he felt it too.

But Klaus' expression swiftly brought Taki back to reality.

‘I'm not letting Taki go off to the east now, if that’s what you’re asking. Especially not if it's slowly turning into Mussolin's Eurote back there.’

Even though he heard the warning tone in Klaus’ voice, Haruki pressed on.

‘Uemura also mentioned that maybe, even if it was just you, Klaus-sama, I – we could really use your insight and your help at the compound, even if it was just for a few days. If we had the chance to brief you properly on –’

‘There’s no way in hell I’m leaving Taki.’

The silence that followed was suddenly uncomfortable. Haruki saw the look on Klaus' face and realised he had made a blunder.

‘I – I didn't –’

‘I know we owe you our lives, kid,’ said Klaus, his voice low. ‘But I didn't think you'd choose a time like this to cash in a favour.’

Steam rose silently from three mugs.

Haruki looked crestfallen. Taki’s heart sank.

‘Klaus-sama, I'm sorry, that's not what I –’

‘As far as I'm concerned Tachibana can blow us all to kingdom come. Nothing we do ever seems to make any real difference in the end.’

He turned and took a few steps towards the window.

Haruki realised it was a mistake for him to have come at all. He ought to have waited for Azusa or Moriya, who would have been able to phrase everything better than he could. For the first time in a long time, he suddenly felt like the naïve cadet he had once been.

Taki watched them both with a heavy heart. It had been so long since he'd heard Klaus speak about world affairs that he didn't realise his apathy had grown to such an extent.

A small voice spoke up in the corner of Taki's mind. The one that only made itself heard in rare circumstances.

‘You should stay with us.’

Klaus and Haruki turned to him.

‘Stay with you?’ Haruki echoed in slight confusion.

‘Just for a few days. Can you spare the time before you and Azusa return to the compound?’

‘We –’ said Haruki falteringly. ‘I can, but Taki-sama –’

‘You could learn what you can from us, here. It won't be much, but it'll be something.’

Klaus recognised the tone of his voice. Duty had called.

‘Taki,’ said Klaus warningly. ‘You're not in any shape to –’

Taki fixed him with a look. ‘I'll be fine.’

A familiar impasse.

Haruki glanced from one to the other.

‘Kid,’ said Klaus quietly, his eyes still on Taki. ‘Could you give us a minute?’

Almost relieved, Haruki stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door behind him.

* * *

A few clouds had gathered directly above the cottage, though they were white and unthreatening. Just before the distant mountains, however, was the storm that the forecasts had promised. It would find them in a few short hours.

Haruki stood on the edge of the porch and stared across the wheat field. Here, then, was where Klaus and Taki had disappeared all those years ago. He had the sense that he had intruded on their secret and their peace, even though he knew, just from looking at Taki, that their peace had been shattered long before then. He felt another swell of shock and anger over what had become of Taki, anger that was directed at no one in particular.

But in that moment he also found that he was spellbound by the simple beauty of Klaus’ cottage. The wheat, rich and mellow at the same time, stretched all the way to the edge of the property that was bordered by the deep, soothing green of their neighbour’s corn stalks. He only heard wind and smelled that earthy, dusty scent unique to wheat.

Once Klaus and Taki were done talking, Haruki would apologise and return to town. He would probably remain there while Azusa, Moriya and Date paid their respects to their former commander. And then he would return to the east and resume his duties. He had disturbed their peace for long enough.

He thought about Klaus’ blunt declaration that he would never leave his master. Though it hadn't quite hit the mark, it had somehow landed uncomfortably close to Haruki’s latent guilt – part of the reason why he had been so keen to come, to arrive ahead even when Azusa had been held back.

_Well, fuck me dead._

Haruki allowed himself a smile.

He had seen Klaus. That was more than enough. Even if he hadn’t had the chance to tell him just how much of his life had –

The front door swung open and Klaus stepped out. Their eyes met for a brief moment before Haruki spoke.

‘I’m sorry, Klaus-sama, for earlier –’

‘Not your fault, kid. What I said was out of line.’

He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead he took a few steps towards the edge of the porch. Haruki saw a small muscle twitch in his jaw. Something in the way he stared at the floor then out across the field reminded Haruki of the night he had shared a room with Klaus and woken to see him sitting still at the window and smoking. He was a world away, as though his mind was with Taki, wherever he was, and his body was longing to catch up.

 _His love for Taki-sama_ , a young Haruki had slowly realised that night, _is different to our love for Taki-sama._

‘How’s he doing?’ Haruki asked quietly, hoping he wasn’t overstepping again.

Klaus was silent for a few moments.

‘Not good.’

The simple words were like an anchor weight in the bottom of Haruki’s stomach. He could only imagine how much Klaus had been through in the past year to be able to admit such a thing.

‘Then again, the doctors gave him eight months and it’s been twelve. He’s always been stubborn like that.’

A sad chuckle.

Haruki could feel Klaus’ desire to seize the problem by the neck. Shoot it or punch its lights out. He sensed Klaus’ terrible impotence. His powerlessness. It made Haruki even more ashamed of the fact that he was there and what he had almost asked of them.

And so he didn’t at all expect for Klaus to invite him to stay.

‘Klaus-sama, I can’t –‘

‘If you leave now, Taki’ll blame me for it.’

‘But –’

In the living room, Taki had been adamant. Klaus hadn’t heard that much tenacity from him in months and wondered where it had all come from. He had finally caved against his better judgment. He told himself it would only be for a few days and that it was a hell of a sight removed from Taki trekking to the east.

‘And when I think about,’ Klaus said. ‘You being here and talking to him about what’s going on out there might help take his mind off… everything. You’ve done a better job of that in the past few minutes than anything else has so far.’

Haruki stared at him helplessly. ‘I don’t want to be a burden,’ he said, feeling cornered.

‘Not this again,’ Klaus said, feeling a fond frustration over the customs of the east. ‘Trust me, you won’t be.’

'Is there something I can do in return?'

Klaus considered him for a moment almost in amusement. He looked at the storm clouds. The heralding wind pulled a little more forcefully at their clothes.

‘After the rain, you can help with the harvest if you like. We haven’t hired help for that or for anything else around the place in months. Hard work, though,’ he warned.

'I’ll do it,’ Haruki said at once. ‘Anything else?'

Klaus chuckled at his familiar determination. It seemed some things hadn’t changed over eight years. He assured Haruki that would be plenty.

There was a pause where Haruki tried to catch up with the small, surprising turn of events.

‘I – thank you, Klaus-sama. I really didn’t expect –’

'Hey, enough with the _sama_. It doesn't work like that anymore, Commander. I mean it.'

Haruki tried again. ‘Klaus-san.'

'No _sans_ either. My house, my rules.'

'Okay…’ Haruki said, but found he couldn’t bring himself to say Klaus’ name without an honorific.

His discomfort made Klaus smile.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘While we were talking earlier, you never referred to the newest Son of Heaven as _sama_ or His Majesty or anything like that.’

Haruki thought of Tachibana and everything he was doing to the east.

‘Bad habit,’ he said with a small, wry smile.

Klaus laughed.

Again recognising the sound of that bright, booming bark as though from an old dream, Taki glanced up at the front windows from where he was sitting on the couch. His heart lifted properly for the first time in months.

* * *

A few hours later, as dusk and the storm approached in tandem, there was a knock on the door. Rudi had been sent by Verner to warn them about the storm and see if they needed anything. Afterwards, he was halfway to the gate before a thought occurred to Klaus.

‘You haven’t gotten the combine working yet, have you?’

Rudi confirmed that he hadn’t, although he’d been trying. And so Klaus introduced Haruki to him as the best tech brain out of the east.

‘I’m sure the two of you can whip her back into shape.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Haruki as he shook Rudi’s hand. He flashed the tall, tanned neighbour a smile that made him look away shyly.

Klaus was surprised to hear Haruki speaking his own language.

Rudi, meanwhile, left the house thinking about Taki, Midori and Haruki and wondered whether everyone in the east was beautiful.

* * *

The dream was vague but filled with rose petals, rich and red like blood, soft and heavy at the same time, that rained from nowhere and covered everything, every inch of ground. They stretched for miles in every direction, but Klaus didn’t have to look in every direction. He was focused on a spot right before him. He sifted the petals, metres deep, aside. He pushed through the layers, the scent swimming in his blood. A little further and he would find it. He kept pushing.

And pushing.

And there it was, right on the tips of his fingers –

Only to sink further in before he could grasp it.

And so he kept going. He would remember what it was as soon as he found it. He would free it and lie beside it in the sun atop the petals. And somewhere in the distance were the high, sweet, mewling barks of a pup of some sort.

He awoke without any memory of whatever it was he had been searching for. But the scent of the petals remained.

He turned and saw the way Taki’s hair trailed across the pillow like the wind had caught and frozen it. He moved closer and rested his face in Taki’s hair, softly enough that he wouldn’t wake him. He recalled with a slight jolt that Haruki Yamamoto had turned up the previous day and was currently asleep in the room that had once housed an ancient boiler.

But the more pressing concern was the fact that the smell of Taki’s hair was stronger then than Klaus could remember. His chest rose and fell gently and steadily. His face, though still overly thin, seemed at peace.

Despair and hope had become one and the same. Still, Klaus couldn’t help gathering him close and allowing for relief to well in the pit of his stomach.

His closeness woke Taki. Klaus’ lips were warm on the nape of his neck, arms tight around his chest.

Klaus was searching out the scent that had filled his dreams and was suddenly stronger then, that morning. He could almost taste it when he licked Taki’s neck. When he bit it gently. His fingers pushed beneath Taki’s shirt and palmed his narrow waist. Almost as an afterthought to his sudden hunt – nothing more than a subconscious, surreptitious channelling of desire – Klaus’ cock grew in the small of Taki’s back.

And suddenly Taki was panting in his arms and arching his back. There was a soft sigh that could have been a moan.

The hunger he had held back swept in like a flood. It had been two months since he caved to it. He didn’t stop to ask whether Taki was alright. He slipped under the blanket and turned Taki, so light now, onto his back and pulled his pants free. He dove into the familiar musk of him, the taste that hadn’t changed, the feel of his skin on Klaus’ tongue and chin that hadn’t changed. He took Taki’s cock into his mouth and thrust with his fingers in a steady rhythm until Taki came. He tasted the same.

When he surfaced, he undid Taki’s buttons one and time, from the bottom up, until their chests were pressed close and Taki’s legs were wrapped around his hips. He held Taki’s face in both hands.

His lower half melting, succumbing to that hot, pulsing energy that only Klaus could ignite, Taki saw that familiar glint in Klaus’ eye. The relief and anxiety and desire mingled when Klaus kissed him and pushed into him in the same breath. Taki prayed that he would be well enough to make it through this, at least this, which he wanted so badly himself.

‘Klaus! Nngh…’

Taki’s moans folded around them, cocooning them from the past year. Klaus drew more of them out with each thrust, with each time he kissed Taki’s neck, the collarbones that stuck out too far, the smooth skin of his chest. Klaus would fill Taki with himself. Taki was his, he would remain his, and it was unthinkable that he could be anything else.

The tears that trickled, the tears that Taki hid when Klaus turned him over and kissed his back and shoulders and entered him again, were from Taki’s pain which had begun not long after Klaus pushed in. The tears were from pain, just as they had once been from his self-disgust and his fear, and they were hidden from Klaus once again for his sake.

It had happened like this, just once, in the middle of the war, when Klaus’ drug-addled mind had torn Taki’s clothes and virtue from him in that basement room at the compound and Taki had grit his teeth and borne it for Klaus’ sake, even though Klaus awoke with no memory of what he had done. And like that, Taki sacrificed himself again.

And it was worth it when Klaus collapsed beside him, huffing, sweating. Taki felt Klaus’ come trickle from him. He wiped his face furtively in time to meet Klaus’ lips in a kiss. He hoped the searing in the lower half of his body would soon ease. Keeping it from Klaus to that extent almost doubled the pain. But he bore it. If only for that morning, he would bear it.

Klaus watched him carefully but was assured when Taki told him he was just a little tired. He kissed Taki’s eyelids with a small flicker of guilt.

When Klaus got dressed to get started on breakfast, Taki stayed in bed and curled into himself. It was worth it, for Klaus’ sake. And it was worth it when the sound of Klaus singing rang through the cottage and even woke their guest.

Haruki didn’t have any idea why Klaus later that morning declared that he must be Klaus' good luck charm.

* * *

The first two nights Haruki spent at the cottage were filled with rain and there wasn’t much they could do for the harvest. But in that time, whenever he wasn’t sitting with Taki and asking questions and absorbing everything the former commander had to say, Haruki put his mind to fixing whatever he could in the house. The kitchen drain was fixed, the television had its antennae straightened, and sound from the radio emerged with greater clarity.

When he opened the cabinet doors to take a look at the gramophone, he was surprised to see small, jagged pieces of pale porcelain, four or five of them, placed on the cabinet floor beside the gramophone. He picked up one of the broken pieces and saw the edge of an ornate rose engraving. He wondered if it had once been a bowl or vase of some sort. And why the pieces hadn’t been thrown away. He replaced the piece and carefully lifted the gramophone out.

Klaus was surprised and thrilled to discover that Haruki had not only completed his armour training at Luckenwalde but, prior to that, he had learned to fly.

‘Ryoumei Fukushima and I went through flight school together in the west,’ Haruki said.

‘Fukushima?’ said Klaus. ‘Your old roommate who never combed his hair?’

‘That’s him,’ said Haruki with a broad grin.

The house was suddenly full of talk about cross-wind take-offs and rudder pressure and air pockets. Taki listened quietly over dinner. Klaus brought the meal out to the living room so Taki wouldn’t have to rise from the couch. Though he was largely bedridden, Taki’s spirits were higher than they had been for a long time.

‘Cross-wind I don’t mind so much,’ Klaus said. ‘It’s the tail-wheel take-offs that piss me off to no end. Those things should be packed up and sent to a museum.’

‘I actually like tail-wheel aircrafts,’ Haruki countered. ‘You need to be more aware of the whole plane. I like the challenge.’

‘Just when I thought we were starting to get along.’

Their easy laughter reminded Taki of how Klaus had been with Meiji. It was strange how something that had spiked the most overwhelming jealousy years ago now had almost the opposite effect.

‘You should take the _Sagi_ for a spin,’ said Klaus. ‘That old bird hasn’t seen action in years.’

Haruki seemed delighted at the thought. Ori sprang deftly onto his lap, nearly upsetting his plate.

Klaus leaned back in his seat and shook his head slightly. He thought of the cadet who had climbed a tree outside his prison cell.

‘I can’t believe you learned to fly, kid.’

Haruki’s smile suddenly seemed self-conscious. ‘Yeah,’ he said, grinning down at his plate. ‘I guess I… managed to get a grip on that one extra dimension.’

‘That one extra what?’

‘Oh, it was just – it was something you said to me once. How it feels like you can suddenly do anything in the world when you fly, even though flying adds just the one extra dimension. The up –’

‘The up-down dimension,’ said Klaus suddenly.

Haruki stared. ‘You remember?’

It came to Klaus unexpectedly; he had waited for Taki in the moonlit courtyard and Haruki had found him armed with a rumour that Klaus had recently flown a plane. He had no idea why such an uneventful memory should come back to him.

‘That was right before Operation Hannibal.’

‘Yeah, I remember you were gone for a long time after that.’

‘Blowing up a railway line takes longer than you think.’

Haruki grinned. ‘However long it took, it won us the war.’

‘Hear that, Taki?' laughed Klaus. 'They’re teaching kids that I single-handedly won the war.’

‘That’s...’ Haruki tried. ‘That’s not exactly what they’re –’

‘About time I made the history books. Did they also tell you I brought down fascism?’

Haruki laughed and gave up.

* * *

On the third day of Haruki’s stay, when there was a pause in the rain, Rudi and Haruki worked on the combine and discovered, among other things, that they were born only days apart and had grown up alone with a single father.

The smell of wet grass and fields infiltrated the cottage even stronger than when it had been raining. Before going inside, Klaus paused for a moment on the front porch to watch the pair of them working on the edge of the wheat field. He then thought about Heinrich and Midori leading Wolfsbane around through the snow earlier that year.

He sat on the couch beside Taki who had just woken from a doze. Heidi Reinhart was playing softly through the gramophone that Haruki had improved.

‘Want to hear me call it?’ said Klaus.

‘Call what?’

‘I call Heinrich and Midori,’ said Klaus. ‘And Haruki and Rudi.’

Taki needed a second to understand what he was talking about.

‘The second pair’s a wild guess. But the first one’s a no-brainer. I’m pretty sure Claudia’s making arrangements already.’

Taki smiled gently.

It wasn’t the first time he had experienced the surreal sense that the world would keep spinning once his eyes closed for good. At first, he had despaired over it. Now, that very fact gave him hope.

‘Midori once told me she wanted a knight from the west,’ he said.

‘Really? She told you that the last time she was here?’

‘No, she told me when she was seven.’

Klaus laughed and Taki felt the sound wash over him again.

‘You were nine when you asked for me,’ he said, his eyes simmering. ‘The Reizens know what they want early.’

He kissed Taki’s temple. And wondered, yet again, whether he had done right by that nine-year-old boy.

Heidi crooned away behind them, asking if it would be a sin.

* * *

Klaus taught Haruki how to hand-pick in a few quick steps, like he had done for Taki years ago. He smiled at the kid’s enthusiasm. His warning that Haruki should pace himself, especially in that heat and especially until his body got used to the unfamiliar motions of the scythe, seemed to fall on deaf ears.

They headed further out to the edge of the field towards the road where Klaus had last left off.

Haruki fell under the spell of the colours and the silence. Klaus noticed him staring off at the mountains like Klaus himself had done once at the age of ten.

‘Dreaming of flying over them?’

Haruki looked round. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said, before turning back to look at the mountains. ‘But now that you mention it…’

Klaus chuckled.

‘Actually I was thinking how nice this place is,’ Haruki admitted.

Klaus looked at him and then turned to sweep his eyes over the field and the cottage, trying to see it as though for the first time.

_What if you came with me to my country?_

He remembered how Taki had looked as he made his proposal beneath the wisteria.

‘It’s funny,’ he said, and Haruki glanced up at the strange tone in his voice. ‘The whole time we were here I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that we were living someone else’s life.’

_A life I never deserved. A life I would eventually have to give up._

Haruki’s heart pounded at the suddenness and gentleness of the confession. Klaus seemed far away again, as though he hadn’t even been aware that he had spoken.

And then Klaus slowly brought himself back. He was a little surprised he had said such a thing aloud, and in the presence of the kid no less, but it was somewhat absolving to have someone hear it.

Just as Haruki wondered what he could possibly say in response, Klaus gave him a small smile and swung his pack up.

‘Ready?’

* * *

On each of the four days that Haruki stayed at the cottage, Taki would put aside several hours to speak to him. Their conversations ranged from front line defence and emergency deployment all the way to abstract politics. Taki seemed to understand everything Haruki was talking about, every little question that had flitted across Haruki's mind for weeks.

Taki would often be lying on the couch, his head propped up on cushions, and Haruki would sometimes be sitting but oftentimes he would pace slowly.

‘Klaus wasn’t far off the mark when he said it’s turning into Mussolin’s Eurote,’ Haruki said, allowing a little bitterness to creep into his tone. ‘What’s worse is how fast it’s happening. We barely had a chance to realise what was going on before people were suddenly too scared to speak.’

‘It’s partly our fault,’ Taki said after a grave pause. ‘Meiji-sama’s and mine. When he reigned, we took steps to consolidate all power with the emperor. He has more power than any of the shoguns or any of the other arms of government – more than at any point in our history. We should have foreseen something like this.’

Haruki stopped pacing and sat beside Taki. A heretical, treasonous thought had been upsetting him ever since Tachibana had taken the throne.

'Taki-sama,' he said. 'When... when you're torn between the duty you've been trained to believe in and - and what you feel to be right... how do you choose? When they're completely at odds?'

Even though Haruki knew full well about Klaus and Taki, it took Taki a few seconds to understand that the question hadn't been asked pointedly in any way.

'You're talking about your duty to the current emperor?'

'Yes.'

Taki sighed and shifted himself a little. Haruki looked up in concern, wondering if he had pushed him enough for a day.

'You serve the emperor,' Taki said. 'That's the only way it works. That's the only way the military chain of command works. Anything that veers away from that, even slightly, is mutiny and treason.'

Hearing it said so calmly made Haruki feel somewhat ashamed.

'And mutiny,' Taki continued, his tone changing slightly, 'should only be considered if the people you fight for are at stake.'

The hard edge in his voice inspired something entirely different in Haruki.

'You serve the emperor, but your only real duty is to your people. The people of your province and your estate. Your men on the field and their families back home. They've put their trust in you. They're the ones you're fighting for.'

In that moment, Haruki felt a strange tumble of emotions. The fact that the world should lose a man like Taki Reizen suddenly seemed like an injustice that the gods surely wouldn't abide.

Taki then watched him for a few moments and hesitated.

‘I hope you don’t mind my saying,’ he said, trying to sound curious and not interrogative. ‘Flight school. And Luckenwalde. It seems Klaus has had a huge influence on your life.’

Haruki dropped his gaze and faltered a little.

‘He –’

Taki noticed that the poise and sharpness Haruki had cultivated over the years tended to fall away whenever Klaus was brought up.

‘You both have, Taki-sama,’ Haruki said finally. ‘If I can be half the soldiers you were, I’ll have done my country proud.’

* * *

That night, Taki remembered speaking to Haruki by the dusty amber lamp in the corner of the living room. The next thing he knew, he awoke in Klaus’ arms, being carried to the bedroom. The house was dark and silent around them. He was about to tell Klaus to put him down but by then he had learned to let Klaus do little things like that; things that made Klaus feel like he had some inkling of control over a situation neither of them could ever hope to control.

They talked about Haruki who was asleep in the room that had once been Taki’s.

'He's doing well,’ said Klaus. ‘He's a good kid.'

There was a short pause as Klaus lowered Taki to the bed and climbed in beside him. It was too hot for blankets and even Taki’s skin was warm that night.

'You still think of him as a child,' said Taki carefully, part question, part statement.

Klaus laughed softly. ‘How else am I supposed to see him? I still picture the kid who was pushed to the ground by his little dickhead friends.'

Taki thought of the conversation he had with Haruki’s friends, who sheepishly confessed what had happened.

‘Haruki was defending you in that fight, wasn't he?’

Klaus thought about it. ‘Yeah, he was.' He looked at Taki. 'You have some memory.'

There was a small pause.

'I've just been turning things over a lot,' said Taki.

Another soft chuckle.

'Glad one of us can do that. Hurts my head too much.’ He pulled Taki close, careful not to hurt him. 'How's he doing with you?'

‘Good,' Taki replied. ‘He's a fast learner. But I can see his tendency to be reckless. He has a strong sense of justice. Almost too strong.'

Klaus smiled.

'The kid could be our son.' He yawned. 'I mean, I would've been twelve when I had him. Still, though...'

Taki stared into the darkness of the room and didn’t say anything more.

* * *

Earlier that day, Taki had watched Klaus and Haruki working in the wheat field.

And he had finally lifted his pen and started writing.

The words came without pause. Without Taki even having to stop and think.

_Klaus,_

_My knight. You have endured well._

_It will be a long time before you forgive yourself. I hope you understand that this was far beyond your reach. I hope you understand how much it meant to me that you tried nevertheless. I saw how much you tried every day and how much it took from you._

_We both carried our burdens. Yours was mine. And mine was the fear that by dying, I was slowly killing you. In mind, if not in body, you were wasting away. For a while, I had no hope._

_And then one day, he appeared as if by magic among the golden stalks outside._

_As I'm writing, you are outside instructing Haruki on the harvest. The sun is blinding on the swaying fields and he has just thrown his pack to the ground for a rest, despite all of his bravado only twenty minutes ago. You are standing with your hands on your hips not far from where you first encountered him a few days ago. There is a smile on your face that I know well but have not seen in recent memory. Though it is hard to explain why, your laughter makes it so that I can finally feel the breeze that has moved these stalks for months._

_In only a few days, young Haruki has lifted my burden. It may even appear that he has lifted yours, though I fear in reality that yours is yours alone to bear._

_Forgive me, Klaus. Forgive me for being unable to_

And at that point, he was overcome with a fit of sorrow so strong that he almost confused it for another episode. His throat ached. His hand shook to the point that he had to lift the pen to stop it from blotting the page.

He reminded himself that the world would keep spinning once he had left it. And that, for the first time, it gave him hope.

He took a deep breath, looked out the window once more, and kept going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Commanders of the Fifteenth Armoured Division**
> 
> For all those who are struggling to picture anything other than little cadet Haruki, here's my rendering of adult Haruki compared to Taki as Commander.
> 
> Just wanted to say a quick THANK YOU to Germlord for inspiring me to draw this in the first place and for her lovely reaction to it - you're way too kind, my dear!! Xx
> 
> I drew as much as I could from little Haruki from the manga but as always, I went a little rogue:  
> 


	44. Wolfpup

The next day, which was Haruki’s last at the cottage, Azusa finished his work in the capital, Date’s train arrived from the east and Moriya flew in from Eurote.

Taki awoke in the pleasant, muted mid-afternoon light to hear soft voices in the bedroom. All of them were familiar; even Haruki’s new deep voice that Taki had gotten used to hearing around the house over the past four days.

They fell silent when they noticed he was awake. Taki looked around and saw each in turn; Date sitting cross-legged on the ground, Haruki and Azusa sitting on cushions brought in from the living room and Klaus and Moriya standing near the window.

Klaus smiled. ‘The gang’s all here, Taki.’

Taki's breathing was a little laboured that afternoon but a memory swam to him from another land where he had just been found and rescued and Klaus held him close as he wrapped bandages around the wound in his hip. Explosions and gunfire rang all around them.

 _You shouldn’t have_ come, Taki said. _They’ll kill you._

_They’ll have to go through everyone outside first._

_Who –?_

_I couldn’t put an army together in time. But the team outside is the next best thing. Trust me._

Taki stared up into their faces; the faces of his men who had gone so far and risked so much to bring him home. Everyone, including Klaus, was startled when tears clouded Taki’s eyes.

* * *

Later that afternoon, a car wound its way up the dirt road towards the cottage. Heinrich Strauss leaned on his arm against the window, excited at the thought of surprising his uncle with their visit and with his good news, even if they could only stay for a few minutes.

Claudia sat beside him. The car was driven by the ageing Mr. Fritz who was giving them a lift to the station and back, albeit painfully slowly.

Just as Heinrich wondered how Taki might be doing, they cleared the top of the incline and the golden fields came into view. And there Taki was, fitter than ever, walking Wolfsbane through the stalks of wheat.

Surprised and delighted, Heinrich alerted his mother.

Haruki glanced round when the small car came to a stop near him and was more than a little surprised to see a very young Klaus staring at him from the back window. A pretty woman in her late thirties was staring too.

After he led Wolfsbane closer to the car and introductions were made, Haruki still stared in wonder at Klaus’ thirteen-year-old nephew.

‘You look just like your uncle,’ he said.

‘It’s terrifying, isn’t it?’ said Claudia wryly. ‘And he’s all set to follow in Klaus’ footsteps. He just made the cadet program at Klaus' old flight school.’

Haruki congratulated him warmly. ‘I started as a cadet too.’

‘What are you now?’ Heinrich asked.

‘Believe it or not, they’re about to make me Commander at Taki’s old division.’

‘Are they really?’ said Claudia with interest. ‘That’s wonderful.’

‘Mama, can I walk Wolfsbane?’

‘Ask Haruki if that’s alright.’

‘Sir, can I walk Wolfsbane the rest of the way?’

‘You don’t have to call me _sir_ ,’ said Haruki with a smile.

‘Yes, I do. You’re an officer. Sir.’

Heinrich followed this up with a prim salute after he got out of the car. Claudia climbed out too, figuring that at the rate old Mr. Fritz was going they would probably beat him to the cottage on foot. In that short time, Claudia quickly warmed to the young man whom she had at first mistaken for Taki.

‘We don’t have much time here,’ she said. ‘Our train to the capital leaves in an hour. We thought we'd stop by to surprise Klaus with Heinrich's news and drop off some food. It’s a lovely coincidence that we were able to meet like this.’

Haruki almost quoted Klaus’ little mantra that there was no such thing as coincidence, but he simply smiled and agreed. Heinrich walked Wolfsbane around the house to the stables.

As Haruki and Claudia drew up to the front porch, the door was abruptly pushed open from inside and Claudia nearly ran into a very tall and rather dashing Easterner in glasses and rolled up sleeves. He was followed by an even more attractive man with fair hair and Eurotean features. They were carrying a long stretch of broken fence between them.

‘Pardon me, ma’am,’ said Moriya, in heavily accented Saxon as he passed.

Azusa flashed her a smile.

‘Oh, my,’ said Claudia with a very slight blush.

She and Haruki walked through to the kitchen where Klaus turned in surprise.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Klaus…’ Claudia said, looking over her shoulder and sounding somewhat enchanted. ‘How have you managed to fill the cottage with so many handsome men?’

Klaus chuckled as he bent low to kiss her on the cheek. ‘They’re not all handsome. Wait until you get a load of Date.’

Haruki laughed and tried to disguise it as a cough halfway through, just for the sake of propriety, which made Klaus smile in turn.

‘It almost makes me sad to leave so soon,’ said Claudia.

After she enquired about Taki, who was asleep, and as she told Klaus about Heinrich’s news, Moriya came back through the kitchen carrying fresh stacks of lumber for the rabbit-proof fence. He caught Claudia’s eye before heading the back door. Claudia blushed and absently tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear.

‘Alright, that’s enough gawking from you,’ Klaus said, annoyed. ‘You’re happily married or something, remember?’

That was the moment Rudi happened to walk in, bare-chested and sweating over defined pectorals.

‘For God’s sake, Rudi, put a shirt on,’ Klaus said, feigning exasperation. ‘There are ladies present.’

Rudi looked mortified. He was too startled to read the room, which was lighter than it had been in almost a year. He also failed to notice that everyone was smiling, or the way Claudia rolled her eyes at Klaus.

‘I’m – I’m really sorry,’ he stammered.

Haruki took pity on him. ‘It was a joke,’ he said.

But Rudi cast Klaus a worried glance and decided he should head home for a shirt to be on the safe side.

‘I think Rudi’s afraid of me,’ Klaus observed after he left.

‘Of course he is,’ said Claudia. ‘He always has been. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘No,’ said Klaus, genuinely surprised.

‘That doesn’t surprise me. You wouldn’t notice anything unless it knocked on the front door and announced itself.’

Klaus suddenly recalled the look on Rudi’s face when he half-jokingly told him he might have been shot if Klaus had a gun handy.

‘Geez, the poor guy,’ Klaus realised, both guilty and amused. ‘No wonder he’s so twitchy around me.’ He turned to Haruki. ‘Will you let him know I’m not really that bad?’

Haruki smiled. ‘Sure.’

‘Need a hand with the welder, Wolfpup,’ Moriya called through the kitchen window, just as Azusa came back in looking for a rest.

‘Okay,’ Haruki called back as he headed out of the kitchen.

Klaus glanced round in surprise. ‘What did he just call you?’

Haruki stopped in his tracks and turned. Something in his face reminded Klaus of how he had looked at fourteen.

‘He, uh, it’s –’ he said, also suddenly reclaiming some of the nervousness of his youth. ‘It’s – a long, stupid story.’

Klaus’ eyebrows were up. Haruki made a sound of hesitation.

‘It’s sort of my call sign. It _was_ , anyway, back in flight school. Ryoumei came up with it. He forged it on my form on my first test flight and the instructor kept calling me Lycoutavi and it kind of… stuck. And when I got back to the division, some of the men in the compound started calling me that too.’

‘Out of respect,’ Azusa added. ‘He’s younger than all of us but he fights like a vicious pup. Flies like one too, I’ve heard.’

‘No kidding?’ said Klaus. ‘Lycoutavi, huh?’

Hearing Klaus speak his call sign aloud brought about another nervous grin.

Though Haruki was used to the name by now, it always embarrassed him if he thought about it for too long. He knew it was used by his men as a token of admiration for the abilities he had acquired by his age, but it was as though everyone had forgotten that Taki had been younger than him as Commander. It always reminded Haruki of the shoes he had to fill. The shoes he would never fill.

Beyond that, he knew Ryoumei was up to his own mischief when he christened Haruki with a name derived from Lycanthrope.

‘Yeah, it’s… silly.’

‘It’s great.’

Claudia, who had been watching the exchange, was a little surprised at the redness that touched Haruki’s ears. She glanced at Klaus and was far less surprised to see he didn’t seem to have noticed.

Heinrich came up the back steps, wondering if it was yet time to leave. Something else occurred to Claudia.

‘Well, look at this,’ she said, ‘We have Werewolf, Wolfpup and Wolverine all in the one kitchen.’

They looked at one another. Heinrich, who didn’t expect to have a third of the spotlight swing onto him, suddenly felt shy under the gazes of the other men. He went to stand beside his mother.

‘History ought to take note,’ Claudia said, running a hand through her son’s hair, trying to flatten his fringe.

Klaus laughed. ‘My legacy’s in good hands, then,’ he said airily. ‘Both east and west.’

Haruki grinned and Heinrich beamed.

* * *

They were close. They could feel it. The engine was just about set, all the pieces aligned. Fresh parts and tweaked parts and parts that were contorted to suit the combine’s temperamental nature. A few more turns and she would breathe again.

Haruki and Rudi worked in silence, only muttering a few instructions to one another. Haruki then joined him near the open engine to try to knock the last few pieces together.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Rudi asked suddenly.

When Haruki turned, Rudi was blushing fiercely. Haruki’s pulse skyrocketed.

‘Uh,’ he stammered. ‘Sure.’

Rudi looked like he was already regretting saying anything at all. Haruki held his breath, wondering what on Earth was about to happen.

‘If… if someone from the east – from your country – asks someone to be their knight,’ he said finally, sounding like each word was causing him pain. ‘And they… accept… what happens then?’

Haruki felt a flush take over his face as well. The wording was strange but it sounded very strongly as though Rudi was offering or asking to –

He stopped himself from jumping to conclusions.

‘Rudi,’ he began uncertainly. ‘What exactly are you asking?’

Glancing away, fiddling with his scuffed gloves, Rudi mumbled something that Haruki only barely heard. And even then he wasn’t sure he had heard right.

‘Did you just say Midori Reizen?’

Rudi gave the slightest of nods. Haruki was even more confused.

‘Taki’s sister?’

It slowly began to dawn.

‘You and… Taki’s sister?’

‘She visited a few months ago. I bumped into her while she and Heinrich were walking Wolfsbane and I got – I got her coat dirty by accident and so later I helped her get rid of the stain and then we spent a while together. She wanted to go for walks and learn how to ride and…’

Rudi took a breath and kept going, his words sounding like they were falling out of his mouth. Haruki didn’t recall him saying so much in the short time he had known him.

‘And then a few days later, before she left, she said she… wanted me to be her knight. And I sort of… I said… okay.’

He looked at Haruki as though still shocked by his own reply to the young princess of the east.

‘That’s all you said?’ said Haruki, still trying to wrap his head around the highly unexpected little confession. ‘Just okay _?_ ’

‘I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t even think she liked me. When she saw me for the first time I was covered in grease and I got her coat dirty and the way she looked at me…’

Haruki had to fight back a smile at the picture. He was also a little relieved.

Rudi fell into a pensive silence for a moment, as though speaking about it for the first time made the situation a lot clearer.

‘I meant it,’ he said suddenly but quietly. ‘When I said okay. I don’t know why she picked me. And I don’t know if I’d make much of a knight, but…’

He trailed off, eyes in the distance. Seeing lilac robes and hypnotic dark eyes and a curtain of hair.

‘Isn’t –?’ Haruki said carefully, trying to recall what Klaus had said about Taki’s family. ‘Isn’t Midori fourteen?’

‘I know,’ Rudi all but wailed, his face aflame again. ‘But she’s… she’s really pretty! And when she talks, it’s like…’

Haruki laughed. He couldn’t help it – Rudi’s abashment and attraction and confusion was all too endearing.

‘I just don’t know what happens now,’ Rudi confessed. ‘We’ve written each other a few times, but…’

Haruki ran a hand through his hair and tried to piece together an answer. ‘It’s – being someone’s knight is –’ He thought of the way Klaus looked at Taki. ‘It’s… the biggest thing you can do with your life,’ he said quietly. ‘If you’re both serious about it, there would be a knighthood ceremony when Midori comes of age. After that, your entire life would be hers. You would be forsaking everything – your country, your family.’

Rudi thought about his father. His one pang of regret. Beyond that, there was only one thing he was really worried about.

‘Will I be good enough?’ he said, his voice small.

_What if I let her down?_

Haruki’s heart went out to him. ‘I think you’d make a wonderful knight,’ he said honestly.

Rudi glanced at him, his bright blue eyes filled with uncertainty and gratitude. Haruki smiled.

It was only a few seconds later that the combine turned over and started with a rheumatic sigh. Haruki let out a short, happy laugh and even Rudi grinned from ear to ear, feeling better than he had in weeks. As they tested her mettle on the nearest stalks, something occurred to Haruki.

‘You should talk to Klaus about it,’ he suggested. ‘He’s been a knight for almost ten years now. No one would be able to give you better advice.’

Another slightly anxious gaze. ‘I’m – I don’t think Klaus likes me very much.’

Haruki again fought back a smile. ‘He likes you fine.’ Now was as good a time as any to reassure Rudi on that count, as Haruki had promised Klaus he would. ‘You know, Klaus only seems scary until you get to know him. I was scared of him too, at first.’

‘You were?’

Haruki remembered how he and the other cadets had dashed out of sight when Klaus first turned to look at them. He chuckled at himself.

‘Yes. But he’s…’ His smile faltered just a little. It was suddenly as though he was too self-conscious to try to summarise Klaus. ‘He’s…’

Rudi didn’t seem to notice Haruki’s sudden discomfort.

‘I think I almost saw him cry once,’ Rudi said, with an uncharacteristically ruminative air.

Haruki was surprised. ‘Really?’

‘It was near his truck. When he first told me Taki was sick. He sort of… blinked and looked away. I don’t know, maybe I imagined it.’

He then seemed embarrassed, as though he had seen something he shouldn’t have.

Haruki thought of the time he had seen something similar. On a motorbike in No Man’s Land, a blizzard picking up around them, and Taki’s weak voice saying words that Haruki remembered still. The tears, the words and the kiss that had changed the course of Haruki’s life, even though he didn’t know it at the time.

He looked at the cottage and didn’t know what he felt.

* * *

Before Claudia was due to leave, she helped Klaus unload the food hamper into the pantry and thought about Haruki.

‘They’re all so dashing, but I have to say, that young man takes the prize. He really brightens the place up doesn’t he?’

‘Easy now,’ Klaus warned. ‘I don’t even have to exaggerate when I say you’re old enough to be his mother.’

‘How did you come to meet him?’

‘Who, Haruki?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was a cadet in Taki’s division. He was the only one in the compound who didn’t hate my guts when I first got there. Probably the only one in the entire east, come to think of it.’

‘Really?’ said Claudia slowly.

‘Plus, he saved my life back then. Mine and Taki’s.’

‘When he was still a child?’ said Claudia, startled.

‘Yep. Smuggled his way in the back of a jeep and saved us both in the nick of time, like something out of the pictures. Talk about a sense of duty, huh?’

Claudia watched him close the pantry. She sighed. ‘I take it back, Klaus. You wouldn’t notice anything even _if_ it knocked on the front door and announced itself.’

Klaus raised his eyebrows. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Nothing.’

* * *

Not long afterwards, Taki awoke and Claudia went in to see him. She came out looking drawn and rearranged her features before she saw Klaus. She told him she had changed her mind and would stay after all; Heinrich could make the trip back to the capital alone. She had packed just enough for an extended stay.

Klaus tried half-heartedly to protest, fighting a feeling that began in the soles of his feet, but Claudia had already called Wilhelm and told him to pick Heinrich up from the train station in a few hours.

Haruki, Moriya, Azusa and Date all went in to see Taki before they set off on their own train bound for the east.

After that, laughter slowly trickled from the house. Summer blazed outside but didn't seem to find its way in.

Ori remained for only a short while after Haruki was gone. Then she disappeared again.

It was the last time Klaus ever saw her.

* * *

On the train ride back home, Azusa sat across from Haruki and thought about how he and Taki had discussed him at length.

‘How’s he doing at the division?’

‘Quite well. The men are already looking to him as a commander. I think the ones who remember the last war see a lot of you in him. Plus,’ he added, his face darkening just a little. ‘A lot of them can smell that there’s a war coming. It’s good for someone like him to step in. It gives the men hope.’

He didn’t know that his words made Taki recall an old conversation.

 _Taki means_ 'waterfall' _, doesn’t it?_

He and Klaus had watched the water rush over the edge; cold, ruthless and striking.

_Suits you. Better than mine suits me anyway._

_I think_ ‘the people’s victory’ _suits you quite well._

Haruki, Taki thought. A name which meant 'the light that shines'.

Someone who deserves your light.

‘From time to time,’ Azusa added, interrupting Taki’s train of thought. ‘I remember how Moriya was the one who let Haruki come with us when we pulled you out of No Man’s Land. I think he always saw something in him.’

He paused and wondered if he should say more.

‘But I can tell he’s nervous.’

‘Of the war?’ asked Taki.

‘Of trying to measure up to the last young commander.’

There was a small pause. Despite the changes that had come over Taki, Azusa was struck by the wisdom in his gaze.

‘He’ll do fine.’

* * *

Haruki also thought of Taki.

He thought about their long conversations and everything he had learned.

He had once confessed that he was worried the men wouldn’t have any reason to follow him.

‘Our family isn’t graced by the gods,’ Haruki said, his hesitation hinting at something he had mulled over for years. ‘I’m the furthest thing from an _akitsumikami_.’

It was the closest he could come to his real confession; his fear that his men would look for Taki in him and be disappointed.

Taki considered his words carefully.

‘It’s true you’ll have to prove yourself,’ he said. ‘Sometimes twice as hard as I had to. But because of that, you’ll have earned it.’ After a pause, Taki’s mind turned to Hans. And Klaus. ‘You don’t have to be in one of the eight noble families to be touched by the gods,’ he added.

Haruki smiled gratefully, aware that Taki was only saying it to make him feel better but feeling better anyway.

The day before Azusa and the others arrived, during one of their last conversations, the topic turned to the surprise air raid that had taken the Fifteenth Armoured Division by storm so many winters ago; the day that Haruki met Klaus for the first time.

'I still remember the smoke that filled Murakumo and all the echoing shouts. It was my first time in a tank.’ He glanced up, slightly embarrassed. ‘You probably barely even remember it.’

‘Actually,’ said Taki quietly. ‘I think of that day quite a lot.’

It was the first day he had thought he lost Klaus. He still remembered Haruki’s voice as it had sounded then, telling him the captain had been injured trying to protect him.

Eight years on, they looked at one another and both, in their separate ways, thought about how much had changed.

Taki, whose mind, in those days, was in the past almost as much as it was present, found himself thinking of something Hans had picked up and mentioned in passing. Something Taki had almost immediately disregarded at the time.

_There’s a young cadet harbouring surprisingly strong feelings for Klaus._

‘Haruki,’ said Taki slowly. The world would keep spinning even when his eyes closed for good. ‘I need… to ask a favour.’

Haruki’s pulse quickened. ‘Anything, Taki-sama.’

On the train ride back home, sitting across from the others, Haruki stared out the window and thought of Taki.

* * *

And Klaus thought only of Taki.

The brief happiness of the previous week had evaporated so quickly it was like it had never happened.

But he tried in vain to bring some of it back, like snatches of an old fairy tale, whenever Taki was lucid enough to hear him.

‘Did you know Haruki has a dog?’ he would say as Taki watched him from above sunken cheeks. ‘His name's Kaiser. The thing worships him and waits for him at the front gates of the compound when he’s gone. Apparently the kid found him in the west and brought him to the Fifteenth Armoured Division with him. Just like us, huh?’

Taki’s mind was spinning. He wanted to hold onto the gentle susurrations of Klaus’ voice. To catch onto them like an adjoining current and be pulled away from whatever was trying to drag him down.

He saw, when his vision focused enough, the small wrinkle in Klaus’ brow. It was there without Klaus’ knowledge, Taki was sure. It was there because of him.

Just like the scar was there because of him. And the bullet wound. And other scars they couldn’t even see.

‘I’m sorry,’ Taki said once in a whisper. ‘For that time when…’

Klaus leaned in close. ‘When what?’

‘When I hit you. I cut your cheek. You bled. That’s where your scar is now.’

It was with a huge effort that Klaus was able to recall that day. He had caved to the wolf yet again. Pushed Taki naked against the door of his shed. Made a lascivious remark about his hunger. And Taki had lashed out.

Klaus almost felt like laughing. ‘That was nothing. Why are you apologising for that?’

‘You’ve never…’ Taki replied, straining to make himself heard. ‘You’ve never raised a hand to me. I should never have… I'm sorry...’

He sounded desperate. Almost delirious. Klaus felt a new kind of helplessness. He may never have struck Taki but he had done so much worse. Why was Taki recalling such a thing now? What was he trying to say?

‘Try to rest,’ he gently urged.

* * *

Taki began to see things that Hans had also seen once, in almost the same way that Hans would have seen them. The lavender colours of his sisters. The scent and memory of his mother. The look on Klaus’ face when he kissed him for the first time. An outstretched hand grazing Murakumo’s flank.

He suddenly grew anxious that Klaus may never open the bottom drawer of their bureau to find his letter.

And at some point, he saw Suguri’s face without any of the haze. It was clear enough, and Suguri’s face had aged enough, that Taki was almost sure Suguri was really there. He heard Suguri's voice. He told Suguri to find the letter and give it to Klaus as soon as Taki was gone. He could never be sure if Suguri had heard or if he was even there.

But when Suguri left, he was replaced by a warmth Taki knew. Hands Taki knew better than his own.

And then, in the small hours, Taki heard the temple bells begin to chime, in a land thousands of miles from any such temple. The bells were warding off the evils of the year that was past so the new year could start fresh and unburdened. A new cycle.


	45. A Moan that Carried

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can we please take a second to marvel at this stunning illustration by Tenkamchi-sama, which was done for Chapter 42 of this story. I just. I just can't. Honestly, when there's so much pain and beauty in one hit, I can't describe it! Thank you SO MUCH to Tenkamchi-sama for bringing this heartrending image to life. <3
> 
> (Also here's [a beautiful little scene](http://tenkamchi-sama.deviantart.com/art/Maiden-Rose-The-Final-Chapters-Chapter-38-Illu-647072758) she drew for a previous chapter involving little Heinrich. And here's [more of her amazing work](http://tenkamchi-sama.deviantart.com/gallery/44260736/Maiden-Rose) on DeviantArt.)
> 
> This sad and beautiful Taki perfectly sets the scene for this chapter too Xx

It would take Klaus years to forgive himself for being asleep when it happened.

He would torture himself with questions about what it might have been like for Taki in his last moments. Whether Taki had called to him silently, whether his eyelids had flickered or simply closed, whether he had opened his mouth, whether he had said anything that would have made a difference. Anything that would have prevented Klaus from tumbling headfirst into the pit.

But he fell.

He teetered on its edge when he awoke, a few minutes after dawn had covered the fields outside the window in its cold blue light. It was strange, Klaus thought, to feel stillness. As if it was a thing itself, as opposed to the absence of a thing.

‘Taki?’

His master lay still beside him, his eyes closed, his lips relaxed and very slightly parted.

It only took one look. And Klaus knew.

He knew but he didn’t fall yet. He teetered. His voice shook.

‘Taki. Hey, come on, now.’

He could still smell flowers. He touched Taki’s cheek and jaw. Still warm. Still warm, and the scent of the rose was still there, so –

‘Taki, wake up.’

The talons clutched at his heart and throat. They squeezed until he could barely breathe, but he needed to breathe if he was to wake Taki. Taki would wake bemused and tired and Klaus would apologise for having woken him so jarringly. He needed to focus, to concentrate, to make that happen and the talons weren’t letting him.

He didn’t remember getting up but suddenly he was kneeling and his hands were on Taki’s face and on his chest, trying to hear anything, the softest breath, the faintest thud, anything that kept him here.

Nothing.

‘No. No, Taki, don’t.’

He lifted Taki, he was so light, so faint, like he had never been there at all and it had all been a long, elaborate dream that Klaus was just waking from. His hair fell to the pillow and his lips were still slightly parted. His eyes were closed.

‘Please don’t. Taki, _please!’_

Just for a moment, even for a second. If he could just open his eyes for a few more seconds, while Klaus was there, then he could say it. There were things Klaus had forgotten to say, surely, and he would say it all and Klaus could see the eyes that had bound him so long ago beneath their tree – he could see them just once more.

He begged but Taki remained as silent as he had been in life. The scent of roses, cruelly, still lingered.

And so Klaus knelt in their bed and held his body close.

And let out a deep, guttural wail that woke Claudia and shook her to her core.

* * *

The short hallway was painted the light blue of dawn. Hazy and surreal. She pushed the bedroom door open and her heart splintered at the sight of Klaus crouched over on the bed cradling Taki’s form, his face lost in Taki’s neck. Claudia smelled flowers.

Immense, gut-wrenching sobs emerged from Klaus. Sounds that were torn from the bottom of a well. Claudia felt a simmering panic every time she heard him cry out, like it upset the foundation of the Earth.

That such pain could be caused by someone so still and small in his huge arms seemed obscenely unjust. He rocked very slightly.

She approached the bed and spoke his name but Klaus didn’t hear. He let out another sound, a quieter one, that was a sob and a moan and a grunt. And a plea, Claudia heard.

Crying too, she eventually reached out and touched his shoulder.

‘Klaus...’

He turned and met her gaze and she could see that her brother was completely lost. And that was when a real fear gripped her.

The talons had finally pierced Klaus and crushed him and left him with nothing. Claudia’s familiar face came to him from miles away. Her tears were for someone else, not them.

‘He’s gone,’ Klaus gasped, his eyes dazed and beseeching. ‘He’s gone. I told him I was his. I’m supposed to follow him wherever he went.’

Claudia blinked through her tears.

‘You followed him as far as you could, Klaus.’

‘I’m supposed to follow him.’

She felt another flicker of fear.

‘No, Klaus, look at me –’

‘It’s my fault.’

‘Klaus –‘

‘It’s my fault.’

He shifted Taki until he held Taki’s face to his chest. He had never known whether he had done right by his master. He thought of the boy who had danced, lavender robes whirling. He thought of Taki staring up into his eyes through the window in Luckenwalde. Taki’s small smile as they lay in their tent in the clearing.

He moaned Taki's name into his hair. It was a moan that carried across each of their lives, time and time again.

Claudia tried to gather him up and made a decision in that moment.

She had already lost Taki. She wouldn’t lose her little brother too.

* * *

There were times when Taki didn’t know; when he took shots in the dark and hoped they landed. It happened to him often in battle. And it had happened at times with Klaus, even over the past eight years. Over the past year of his illness especially.

But there were times when Taki knew. Like a voice that knew better had whispered in his ear. During times like that, he knew exactly where he needed to send Murakumo. He’d known it too right before he opened the compartment door on the train and met Klaus’ startled gaze so many years ago. He’d known it when a voice told him  _'E_ _nough now'_  and he had brought Klaus away from everything.

And, in the same way, he also knew the precise moment he was about to die.

The voice that came to him was his mother’s. It was soft and kind and smoothed the edges of a sort of suffocating panic that he knew he would otherwise have felt – a sudden, unbearable, trembling fear of leaving Klaus behind for nothingness. A fear that would have made him wake Klaus and hold onto him as it happened.

But his mother told him, gently, he had nothing to fear. That there was something absolving about what was about to happen. She told him there was a universal grace in death; if Taki was in pain and lived in pain, it would soon be over, but on the other hand if Taki had been lucky enough to live in happiness, then death meant nothing.

Again, he thought of the dream that was part memory and part premonition. He had told the wolf long ago about their final lives. He realised this, these, were their final lives. And they had finally had the time together that they wanted.

Though he could see Klaus’ sleeping face imprinted on his eyelids, he felt the need, he asked his mother for permission, to open them once more, even as his lungs rattled silently, drawing in air on the last flickering embers of energy.

Heavily, he opened his eyes. He saw Klaus’ grip on his hand, tight even in sleep. The face that seemed almost peaceful if not for the hard line of his mouth. The wrinkle on his brow that Taki had seen erased only once, just for a few days, that past year.

Though there was now no panic – no fluttering, suffocating fear – Taki was close to waking him so that he might see the eyes he had seen every morning for eight years, seven of them happy. To tell him something that Klaus already knew, that they both knew Klaus knew, but which would carry the weight of the entire world for Klaus in that moment.

But he thought of the only time over the past year he had seen Klaus’ face like it had once been. The only time his smile was set free and his laugh sounded over yellow fields.

And Taki knew that hearing him then, hearing those words then, would anchor Klaus to the past.

He knows anyway, Taki thought. He reached a hand to Klaus’ face and felt the day-old stubble there. His knight.

My knight, Taki thought. The love of my life. Who had saved him from every enemy. All but one.

Dawn broke gently over the fields. Just as the blackness crept in on the edges of his vision, just as his lungs, relieved, prepared to give up the fight, light slowly poured in over the world outside. Taki’s fingers fell from Klaus’ face to the pillow.

Klaus’ brows drew together slightly in sleep. He didn’t hear what Taki murmured.

But he knows, Taki thought as his eyes closed.

He died happy in the thought that Klaus knew.


	46. Another of Your Vows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some slightly full-on stuff ahead. It gets easier after this, I promise.
> 
> Thank you for reading and for the love, everyone Xx

In the middle of the hush that had fallen over the eastern capital, Haruki wore his full military dress and saluted as the litter passed, borne by six priests.

It was swathed in heavy brocade with a gilded frame and tasselled gold and red curtains on the corners. It didn't seem to suit him, Haruki thought obscurely. It didn't seem to suit the man whose remains were within.

He thought of Taki not as he had seen him in the cottage, gaunt and weak, but as the commander he had known during the war. The steady hand that Taki kept on Haruki’s chest as Murakumo lurched back and forth. The words that reached not only the men in the tank but each man out there, all of them, including the knight who had charged ahead as though fuelled by his master's voice alone. Haruki remembered Taki’s fierce gaze. The katana and the coat. He thought of how it was clear just by looking at him that he was blessed by the gods; he was their son. Their prince. And the world had been fortunate enough to have him for as long as they did.

After hours of following the procession and hours of standing still during the rites, Haruki was relieved that he didn’t once catch sight of any tall, golden-haired foreigners.

His relief came, in part, from his fear of seeing what Klaus must be going through. He had seen a precursor of it only once a long time ago when Klaus knelt before Taki on a platform in the compound as Taki slowly stripped him of his knighthood. Haruki remembered how small he had looked then.

But his relief over Klaus’ absence came mostly from the fact that he would now be able to postpone it.

He had made Taki a promise, but he didn’t know if he could go through with it. It didn’t feel right.

_Say the word and I’ll come running. Little Master._

Summoning Klaus now, of all times, felt like a crime of the highest order. Even if the world was sinking beneath them with Haruki at the helm and with no help in sight, he couldn’t summon Klaus.

Not now.

* * *

It was hard to find a time when Claudia wasn’t there. But Klaus found it somehow. When she took the truck to town to pick up supplies, or when she was hanging out the washing or tending to the vegetable garden, Klaus would take out another bottle from the bottom of his wardrobe or from beneath the mattress. And he would settle somewhere and drink.

Claudia would try to get rid of them, bottles at a time, draining them down the kitchen sink. She got rid of the collection that Klaus had acquired over the years – scotch and brandy, mostly, but also beer and mature wines – in which he had always indulged sparingly for Taki’s sake. But somehow, even after she got rid of all the bottles in the house, Klaus always seemed to find more.

It didn’t give him the sweet release of morphine. It didn’t help him feel the breeze like he once had, when the old man brought him the precious little vials and he stood up to let his coat flap and the wind caress his bare chest and flutter benignly over the wounds on his chest.

But the alcohol did numb him from the grip of the talons. More importantly, it gave him clarity.

It was strange to think that clarity and focus came to him best when he was sitting in the dark in his room, the windows and curtains spinning and when he could barely sit up straight. In that state, of all states, he was able to feel out the talons with almost scientific curiosity. He would be able to tell himself almost rationally that Taki was gone. And how strange was that fact. How unreal.

But when he awoke the following day, when his head pounded from the hangover, that same fact would pierce him. It would hollow him out until he couldn’t see or think clearly.

And so he would reach for the bottle again. For clarity, more than anything else.

At first he had done so without paying Claudia any mind. He had slumped in the corner between their bed and the window. She had come in the morning to find him swigging back the scotch, holding onto the neck of the bottle, his face clammy but his eyes strangely cold and Claudia felt that same fear again.

As much as it had shaken her to hear him wail and sob on the morning of Taki’s death, she knew that he was there, that a part of him was pouring out onto the world. Now, when his eyes were cold and unfocused and unfeeling, it was as though she was trying to find him behind a fold in the air. Like he had slipped backwards into it and she was only seeing a projection of him.

Haruki had seen it too, once as a child when he shared a room in an inn with Klaus, and once, fleetingly, when they spoke of Taki on the front porch. He could feel that Klaus’ mind and heart were with Taki, wherever he was, and his body was longing to catch up.

Claudia sensed it. And so she stayed. She would stay as long as it took to put away the awful, clawing fear that Klaus would try to follow his master.

So she pulled the bottles out of his hands and tried to get him back on his feet. At various times over the week, she would try to get him to sleep or eat or even just respond but he turned a deaf ear. She waited, almost hoped, for him to lash out or to break down. But even when he was drunk out of his mind, she didn’t see a single tear roll. He would relinquish the bottle or the glass without much resistance. It was like he had simply stopped.

* * *

A week earlier, they had arrived to take Taki’s body back to the east. Hasebe and Uemura and others that Klaus didn’t know or care to know. There would be a ceremony, they said. A procession through the capital. The streets would be lined with dignitaries and soldiers and banners would be strung and there would be gongs and drums and large, hollow bells. They would carry his remains on a grand litter bedecked with curtains and borne by priests. It would last hours and culminate at the shrine where Yura had once served as a priestess and where his ashes would be laid to rest.

Klaus listened mutely. He knew already that he wouldn’t go. He would never again set foot in the east.

Claudia tried to convince him otherwise. She tried to tell him it might be good for him. That it would help to see how much the nation loved and mourned Klaus’ young master.

But Klaus knew he couldn’t be there, where Taki belonged to everyone else. Taki was his. Taki would always be his, and it was unthinkable that he should be anything else. So he didn’t want to be reminded that Taki was never his to begin with. That he had stolen their prince, their rose, and buried him beneath the soil.

* * *

The people of their little town, who also deeply felt the loss of someone they considered one of their own, gathered at the cottage to pay their respects. A small black-clad group came together on the lawn beside the rose garden and soft words were spoken without any of the grandeur and ceremony of the east.

Claudia forced Klaus into a suit. She told him it would be for a short time and that she wouldn’t ask anything more of him after that. So he stood outside beside Claudia, feeling as though she was holding him up even though she wasn’t touching him.

Verner and Rudi arrived, as did the Strausses and Fritzes. Gustav and Hesse.

Though the sheriff didn’t show, his wife did, and she tearfully told anyone who would listen about the kindness and chivalry of the young man from the east. Her son arrived as well with his young wife and newborn child in tow.

Klaus roused himself from a kind of conscious stupor in time to discover that he was standing before Franz, the sheriff’s son, who was shakily admitting to Klaus something that had happened with Taki, something involving the truck, years ago.

It all glanced off him. The words, the looks, the condolences. Not even those from his niece or nephew. They were all little echoes from a world to which he no longer belonged. He turned from Franz and disappeared into the cottage and Claudia stared after him.

* * *

They didn’t know. Neither east nor west knew that it was Klaus’ fault.

Not even Hasebe seemed to know. Hasebe who had always despised him. Hasebe who had been there, Klaus suddenly thought. Who had been right there with Taki at Roskilde and escaped unharmed.

Only Suguri carried the knowledge. Only Suguri looked at him with a cold glimmer in his eyes that Klaus recognised from that terrible afternoon years ago when he had shown up at Suguri's office with an unconscious Taki in his arms.

Only Suguri seemed to know why the gods had gone after Taki and not Hasebe. Only Suguri knew it was Klaus’ fault.

Klaus found out that Taki must have told Suguri things. Suguri knew to find Taki’s will and other documents in a drawer in the bureau. Taki had left the cottage in Klaus’ name, once Klaus ceased to be his property. He had also asked for his body to be cremated and for his family to do with his ashes what tradition demanded.

But he also asked for half of his ashes to be returned to Klaus. For him to be laid to rest in the rose garden.

And so Suguri arrived again a week later, after the funereal rites in the east were over, with the ceramic urn in his hands. Claudia hovered near Klaus’ elbow, tears gathering. Klaus stared at the urn, with Taki’s name written in small, bold kanji, and placed it on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace.

When days passed and Klaus showed no signs of taking it down into the rose garden, Claudia gently asked him about it. Klaus didn’t reply.

* * *

Like Taki before him, Klaus thought he understood pain. He thought he knew it when he lost his men in the war and when he had to leave them behind and drag himself home without them. Men he had been responsible for. Men he should have died with.

He thought he knew it when he lifted Taki’s unconscious form in his shed, after he saw the blood on the sheets and the guilt and self-loathing crashed on him like a lead weight. He thought he knew it when Hasebe, acting on divine retribution, whipped and beaten him senseless in that prison cell and was seconds away from taking his life.

He though he knew it when Berkut looked him in the eye and fired into his chest.

When Taki exiled him.

When the bridge blew up and caught him in the chest and face.

When he was shot in the arm. When he lost Ota. When he lost more men.

More men.

He had lost so many.

And he lost the one, the only one, who mattered above all else. And now he understood that the pain he felt before were shadows of the real thing.

It was a pit at first. He teetered on its edge when he woke in dawn’s blue light beside a still Taki. Not long afterwards, he fell. He was dragged by the talons that now pulled him down. He felt them pull him down to face the reality of a life without his master.

And then he emerged from the pit over the course of days.

Onto a strange landscape. One that was much worse than the pit.

It was like flying constantly into pockets of air.

Things, all sorts of things, would open up like little crevasses of hurt. Things that made sense. The empty right side of the bed. Taki’s scent on his clothes, which Klaus would pull from the wardrobe when he was drunk – never when was sober – and bury his face in. Rose petals drifting onto the lawn (he refused to step foot in the rose garden).

And things that didn’t make sense. It seemed his mind had turned on him in the way Taki’s body had turned on him. Like it was searching for associations even when there weren’t any, just to spite him. Things like trees swaying in the breeze which the traitorous voice in his head would insist was how Taki’s hair moved when he turned to look at Klaus over his shoulder. Or a song that played from shop windows where a minor chord or a particular refrain reminded him of the way Taki’s eyes looked in the morning light.

He would feel human for a moment, sometimes several blissful moments strung together, sometimes even for as long as several hours and then, like a creature waiting, the same creature with the talons that pulled him into the pit, it would suddenly rise up from behind what he was seeing, like a great ink stain, and he would feel it in his chest. And he would remember the loneliness that was more awful than loneliness.

Loneliness itself he knew and understood. He had been alone for years before Taki. Here, it was like a vacuum. Something that had been there and then taken away and Klaus felt it, this absence, sharper than anything that was real.

But no matter how many new depths he reached, no matter how much he stumbled and fell in that landscape of grief, none of it showed in the way Claudia expected.

Because he had already decided.

He drank so he would have that clarity; so he could find that place where Taki’s death was only a strange aberration that could be fixed, so swiftly fixed, if Klaus simply went to him. It was almost easy.

He had always known that there was no point in his remaining in the world if Taki left it.

He just had to wait for Claudia to leave him alone.

* * *

But Claudia didn’t. She stayed for so long that Klaus thought surely months had passed, even though they were only weeks.

And Klaus began to feel the rage creep up on him then. She was there. She was still there, and she was the thing stopping him from being with Taki again.

His feelings welled and climbed and burst their way to the surface only once, three weeks after Taki died.

Claudia had been gone for several hours and dusk had fallen. Klaus allowed himself the hope that she had finally had enough of dealing with a brother who had turned to stone. Who would drink himself into a slump in silence and wake in silence and move in silence. He thought that perhaps she had gotten on the train back to the capital on impulse and would phone him guiltily when she was back home.

And so he stared at the gun ponderously in the gloom of the bedroom.

It was one of two he had always carried. It was one of the two guns that he carried when his bike roared past the metal, glinting hull of Murakumo to face Taki’s enemies head-on.

The other was still with Haruki.

His legacy, Klaus thought almost wryly. His and Taki’s, being passed on into the hands of the young. Into those like Wolfpup and Wolverine who would take the mantle and charge ahead in wars that would take more and more, like they had taken Taki and now Klaus.

_Only the dead see the end of war._

And so he stared at the gun, the one he had pulled out of the bottom of his wardrobe and now sat before him on the floor, and he wondered if it made sense. He had always pictured, in fact he had come close to, the end that came at the end of a plunger. Where it would be a moment of sweet, sweet release that he knew well and then coldness and nothing.

Perhaps he didn’t deserve an end like that, and that was why he had never gone through with it before, after the first war.

Perhaps the powers that be had conspired to save him from everything, everything in the first war and the second and the aftermath of the second, just so he could end up here, in the room that was blue and dark and deep and heavy with loss and loneliness and grief, so he could leave it in the way he was always meant to. In a way that was violent and jarring. Something he had been in life.

A shot and a flash. That was all it would be.

But it was still not quite what he had imagined. And his thoughts were muddled again, like they were when he was sober. And so he sat back on the floor against the foot of the bed, with the gun still there in the open doorway of the wardrobe. And he drank. For clarity. To remind himself how much it made sense and how easy it would be.

He allowed thoughts of Taki in again during moments like that, when the alcohol stopped those thoughts from hurting him. Taki sitting on his bed in Luckenwalde, wet from the rain outside, staring at the floor. Had he known then? Had a part of him known what would happen?

Taki taking his hand and holding it beneath his chin, eyes averted as though afraid his feelings would betray him.

Taki bursting through the door of the cell, slicing Hasebe's sword in half even as it came down.

Taki crouching near Klaus and throwing his coat over Klaus’ aching body.

Taki putting a hand on his chest as Klaus carried a pile of kindling. Standing up on tiptoe to kiss him.

Taki clinging to him in the little cove behind the waterfall.

Taki.

Taki.

His leg slipped out from under him as he got closer to the bottom of the bottle. The wardrobe door swung closed until only a part of the little metallic barrel was visible. And scotch raced through him, warming his veins, firing up his chest. Easing the talons enough that he was able to inspect them closely and see the damage. Things were clearer. Taki was clearer. Taki was near.

He could finally ask Taki everything. He would hold Taki by the shoulders and stare and beg until Taki told him things he had forgotten to say when he was alive.

He took another swig. Things were clearer. Taki was clearer. Taki was near.

And then the bottle was taken from his hand.

He looked up and blinked in confusion. Claudia’s face came to him, framed by golden strands of hair. A white lace dress, the same one she had been wearing when she left hours ago.

And suddenly he hated her.

He tried to take the bottle back. He reached for it and missed. He heard the precious few drops slosh around the bottom, the final few he would have needed in order to do it, if only Claudia hadn’t thrown everything off balance. He started to lose focus again.

After Klaus reached for it a second time, the bottle was wrenched from Claudia's hands. Even in that state, even on the floor with his head leaning back against the footboard and eyes bloodshot, she was no match for his strength.

‘He wouldn’t want to see you like this,’ said Claudia, her voice quiet and a little shaky. ‘Look at you. He would be heartbroken, Klaus.’

Klaus let out a strange sound like a laugh.

‘Then this is just,’ he began, his words slurred, ‘another way I’ll let him down.’

Claudia felt her stomach flip. She hadn’t heard Klaus speak of Taki at all since it happened.

‘What are you talking about?’ She knelt beside Klaus and brushed his hair, damp from sweat, out of his eyes. ‘You never let him down.’

Perhaps it was the words themselves, or because her fingers moved through his hair the way Taki’s once had. Either way, Klaus felt something take over him. Something he had held back for a long time.

‘I raped him once.’         

His voice was low. Hoarse. It was one that Claudia had never heard before. A chill ran down her spine.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘He begged me not to,’ Klaus said. His eyes suddenly focused and latched onto Claudia’s. ‘But I held him down and fucked him.’

Claudia felt tears spring to her eyes. She moved away.

‘Klaus –’

He suddenly leaned close and gripped her arms. She felt the air leave the room.

‘I fucked him until there was blood and he passed out.’

His eyes bored into hers without any of the drunken haze from moments ago. His hold on her arms was unrelenting. Almost painful. In that split-second, Claudia realised she was afraid of him. His face was much too close.

‘You don’t know me, Claudia,’ Klaus hissed. ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of.’

There was a ferocity in his eyes that should have had her trying to twist out of his grasp. She should have caved to her instinct to tell him to let her go.

But instead, she thought of the five-year-old who had followed her everywhere. The child who had stared up at her with wide, curious eyes as she taught him how to separate the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones.

And so, instead of pulling away, she put a hand on his face.

‘I do know you,’ she said softly.

After a long, awful few moments, Klaus blinked at her again. The fierceness flickered on and off in his eyes, like he was struggling with the creature that had almost taken control. And then he sagged suddenly. His grip on her arms eased enough that she was able to pull him close and let him sob. She felt his tears as though they were rains after a drought.

Still struggling to process what he had told her, she told him that Taki had only been there with him because he had forgiven him. That Taki loved him.

‘How could he love me?’

_How could anyone?_

His tone was flat. Words that were dropped like dull stones.

She helped him to bed and stayed with him that night. After he fell asleep, she tried to understand what he had told her. She tried to understand why it didn't leave her reeling like she knew it should. Why it didn't change how she saw him. As she lay awake and wondered, her eyes roamed around the dark room.

And they were drawn to a strange glint. Something lay just behind the wardrobe door that hadn't been fully closed.

* * *

The following morning, Klaus awoke first. He lifted his aching head and saw Claudia asleep where Taki used to be. Her hair was loose and spread over the pillow. He sat up gingerly and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The memory of the previous night weighed in his chest like a dumbbell.

Claudia stirred awake too. Klaus glanced at her over his shoulder.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

Klaus turned back and ran a hand over his jaw and neck.

‘Better,’ he lied.

She rose and came to sit beside him on the bed. She looked at him searchingly, as though trying to find the lie in what he had said. Then she leaned against his arm. He smelled the familiar vanilla scent of her shampoo. He glanced down and brushed her hair back from her shoulder.

‘It’s been a while since I’ve seen your hair out,’ he said, his voice slightly rough from sleep. ‘It’s nice.’

She smiled at him and their eyes met for a moment. Klaus then took a breath and stood up.

Claudia remained where she was, lost in thought. She saw the partly opened wardrobe in the corner of her eye.

‘Klaus,’ she said slowly.

He turned.

‘I need you to make me a promise.’

‘A promise?’

‘Another of your vows. Like the ones you made to Taki.’

He stared at her uncomprehendingly.

But when she kept going, when her words made Klaus glance at the wardrobe and realise what she must have seen, he cast his gaze to the floor.

‘Promise me, Klaus,’ she said, her voice trembling a little. ‘Please.’

‘That’s why you’ve been here for so long, isn’t it?’

Tears threatened to spill again. She didn’t say anything more.

And he found that he couldn’t either. He knew he should have lied again. But when she sat before him like that, the lines on her face showing for the first time that he could remember, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her a lie of such magnitude.

So he left the room.

* * *

Another week passed. Claudia had been with him for a little over a month. It was the middle of autumn and school was well underway. Wilhelm never once complained about her absence but it was clear to Claudia, and Klaus by extension, that he was struggling to balance everything at home. That her family needed her.

One afternoon, Klaus listened to her hushed conversation over the phone. After she hung up, she turned to see Klaus approach her with a look on his face she hadn’t seen in a while.

He kissed her forehead. He then took her hands in his and pressed his lips to them as well.

And he made another vow, this time to her, in simple terms, in that little kitchen in their cottage.

* * *

_A FEW MONTHS LATER_

The room lengthened, deepened by grief and memory. Each morning Klaus awoke to it, it became longer and sadder and more deeply imbued with the blue of that dawn when Taki left him.

There was one final day when he lashed out again. He dreamt that Taki was sitting on the bench in the rose garden, his mauve blanket around his shoulders, and Klaus had skidded to a halt before him, his knees burning, and he was crying tears of relief at seeing him again and he heard their Heidi Reinhart song playing from the flowers, from the hedges, from straight out of the ground. And Taki had cried too and touched his face and returned his kiss. Taki told him, softly, that these were their last lives. And that he would be waiting on the other side of the sky. Klaus tried to grab onto every word like they were shards of gold shining at the bottom of a river.

Taki had been on the point of saying more, of finally saying more, when Klaus awoke.

And after Klaus awoke into that blue room, a room that deepened with grief each time he awoke into it, the Reinhart records and gramophone didn’t survive his rage.

He realised he didn’t hate himself or the world or the gods as much as he hated the vow he had made to Claudia. The vow he had made just so she could return to her own family. The vow that kept him tethered to a world that hurt him every day.

He only wanted to escape.

He wanted only to find Taki, wherever he was waiting.

He wanted to –

As he had that thought, he had been standing at the kitchen sink, staring at a simple meal he had forced himself to make and had barely eaten.

And then suddenly, he knew what he would do.

He knew even before he glanced out the window where the _Sagi_ had perched silently at the end of a makeshift runway for eight years.

* * *

_I’ll find someone, like you found Papa, who’ll bring me home._

_But we’ll keep a plane in the backyard so we can go anywhere in the world whenever we feel like it._

He had always been searching. He had spent his entire life searching for something in a way that only Beatrice von Wolfstadt could have been able to understand.

During the years he had spent with Taki, he thought he had found it. He had been so close for so long. And then it slipped beyond his reach.

So he decided he would try to find it again.

After he wrote a short letter to Claudia, he found his goggles at the bottom of the wardrobe. He left his gun where it was. And then he got into the plane.

* * *

He flew north first.

He flew where it was winter almost all the time and the sun came out only to ease the chill, not to warm the land.

He roamed the streets with his hands in his pockets, before coloured houses and bright ocean fronts and among people who were tall and fair, like him, almost all with light hair. There were beautiful women there, more beautiful than any he had ever seen, and they floated by as though their feet never touched the ground.

He saw them without seeing them. He even imagined it, once or twice, when the weeks turned into months. His life before Taki. He imagined it, and sometimes he knew that it would be his if he was in any way inclined, but he never was. The thought of intimacy had never been more unappealing.

Those who saw him and wondered about him felt a strange tug at their hearts. There was something about the large man with the fierce, handsome face and sorrowful eyes that told them he wasn’t really there. It still didn’t prevent a few disappointed gazes from following in his wake in bars and cafes. Gazes he rarely noticed.

He flew south-west where there was smoke in the air and in the food. After he had his fill of the cities he left his plane in the sand and stayed in the desert where, when the wind died, there was a silence louder than any he had known before. It pressed on his eardrums. It was almost like how he imagined death. It was so close to how he imagined, to _where_ he imagined Taki was, that he had gasped suddenly and broken the silence and doubled over in something like dazed grief, panting.*

The next morning, the wind whipped at the folds of his tent and he couldn’t find that silence again, no matter how long he waited. So he took off.

The _Sagi_ was small and couldn’t manage long-haul flights. And so he would radio in to whichever airfield he could in order to fill up on fuel. Wherever he touched down, he saw what he could before moving on. He saw small, remote outposts as often as he saw big cities.

He flew through clouds as white as snow and thunderclouds that were grey and seething. He flew over mountains like he had dreamed he would as a child, mountains which looked like nothing more than immense folds of the Earth from his height. He saw a shrouded, blurry, sleepy yellow moon watching over a slanted archipelago as he turned the plane in to land. He flew over pearly lines of highways flanking expanses of wilderness in that majestic, minute ant colony of a civilisation.

And he flew where there was no light or land at all.

_Hey, Taki. Have you ever flown over the ocean at night?_

Taki had listened quietly, his dark eyes drinking in Klaus’ words.

_You can't see a single thing. The starless sky, the moonless night, looking into that jet black darkness, we used to lose track of everything. We'd fly in search of the tiny light where the waves should end. That hope, and that terror, are still indelibly a part of my life. Everyone's the same. We all get scared. When we lose the light's guidance all we can do is wander aimlessly._

Everywhere he went, he looked for Taki. He saw him in snatches like he did back home. He saw him in the kindness of the man who helped a stranger’s child to his feet when he fell before him. He saw him in the small, shy smile of the girl for whom he held the door open. He heard Taki in snatches of quiet, sonorous voices and in the rain that fell which reminded him of that night in Luckenwalde.

He found traces of him. But he couldn’t find him.

He thought, often, of the language of Taki's homeland. Sweet, dry and soft; demure. Indirect and unassuming. He went to a land where the language was the complete opposite, even as far as rhythmical intonation. It was wet and loud and passionate. Direct and garrulous.

The people in the adjoining nation spoke words that were flowing, purring and sensuous.

The one after had a language that sounded like whip lashes and music.

He thought of the language of the people in the desert - insistent and yearning, written in sand. 

He flew further west to another nation that had banded with his own in the former Western Alliance. The capital, Braxton, was foggy and cluttered and made him feel the first real tug of nostalgia for the quiet, golden fields he had forsaken in his search.  
  
There the language was brisk, precise prose; a typewriter. It was the most commonly spoken language in the world and one that Klaus had learned in school. Still, his accent drew interested looks.  
  
It once grabbed the attention of a man in his forties who sat near him at the bar, drowning his own private sorrows without any of Klaus' steely silence. He inquired about Klaus' nationality after hearing him place his order and gave a short, friendly laugh at having found a fellow veteran of the second war.  
  
'Shame we got our arses handed to us, eh?' he lamented.  
  
He was too drunk to hear Klaus' quiet reply that he had fought for the other side.  
  
Not long after the man put on his creased hat and staggered out of the bar, the bartender arrived to top up Klaus’ drink. He had heard their conversation in snippets.

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured Klaus, assuming the foreigner’s moroseness also owed to some latent regret over the west having lost the war. ‘By the sounds of it, our boys are riled up for another fight. Yours too. We’ll get ’em this time. Third one’s the charm, they say.’

The foreigner’s sharp, golden gaze made the bartender uncomfortable. He made himself busy elsewhere, wondering what he had said wrong.

Klaus had heard about the cold war that had raged while he flew. The spies and secrets. The feeling that the world was on the brink of something new and one false move would trigger it. He had received several suspicious looks himself in some airfields; a foreigner arriving with little more than a passport and no clear motives.

He thought, briefly, of the east. Of the Fifteenth Armoured Division. But the thought wavered when the scotch touched his lips.

And it disappeared completely when a sudden light flashed in the corner of Klaus' eye. He blinked and turned in surprise.  
  
A camera was lowered. It hung around the neck of a girl whose smile was both warm and apologetic.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You just looked so sad. I couldn’t resist.’

She was pretty. In her late twenties, she was small but curvy, with thick black waves that fell past cherubic features. More strikingly, her skin was dark brown and her accent unfamiliar. She wore a glossy blouse and trousers in the cut that Beatrice often wore and Claudia often lamented.

She slid onto the stool beside Klaus and ordered a scotch. Klaus still saw the flash of the camera behind his eyelids. He raised his eyebrows just slightly at her order.

‘Are you a photographer?’

‘Maybe,’ she answered, her accent again hitting the ear strangely. ‘There's also a chance I'm a writer. I’m writing a biography.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Don’t know yet.’

Klaus felt a slow, reluctant smile spread across his face. He cast her another glance. Despite what she looked like, she reminded him very strongly of Beatrice. Her words and her manner also seemed somewhat implausible. It was infectious. It sparked something inside him; a very small flicker of someone he had once been.

He recalled a conversation he had with Lieutenant Shigeki Ota on the eve of Thermopylae.

‘I’ve always felt sorry for anyone who decided they’d write mine,’ he said.

‘That’s a sign, isn’t it?’ she quipped. ‘I’ll write yours if you like. I already have your picture.’

Her drink arrived and she took a healthily sized gulp and grimaced. Then she took the glass in hand and turned to him, legs crossed. Her eyes were huge and brown.

‘But I warn you. I sleep with my subjects.’

Klaus stared in surprise.

‘Not that I've ever written a biography before, but I feel like it'll be an important part of the job,’ she continued, her tone somewhere between sly and upbeat. ‘Especially if my subjects look like you.’

Klaus smiled again. He had never met a woman so forward. There was something of Meiji’s boldness in her gaze.

‘Where are you from?’ he heard himself ask.

‘A place you’ve never heard of.’

The name rang a very distant bell but he confessed he didn’t know anything about it.

So she told him about it. About her small island nation in a southern ocean. About the arranged marriage that was waiting back home, according to custom, and how she had taken off at first light to do inadvisable and frivolous things for as long as she could. There was something of her dry self-awareness that Klaus appreciated. He listened quietly, somewhat intrigued, when she spoke of her dreams of a future where the idea of a woman remaining unmarried wasn’t completely ludicrous.

‘And the man my parents have set me up with is such a _dud_ ,’ she complained, halfway through her second scotch. ‘He’s sullen and serious. I don’t think he knows how to laugh.’

Klaus remained silent. The words left a painful echo in him like innocuous words sometimes did.

‘So what are you running from?’ she asked after setting her glass down. ‘You don’t sound like you’re from here either.’

She watched for a few seconds as he stared into his glass. Her eyes traced out the scar on his face.

‘I lost someone,’ he said finally.

He dreaded the look on her face and was surprised to see only blunt sympathy. By way of response, she fished out a pack of cigarettes and offered him one. Klaus beat her to the lighter.

She left little crescent moons of dark lipstick on the filter of each cigarette she smoked.

By then they had retired into the corner of the bar.

Klaus didn’t say much but it was almost as though he didn’t need to. And suddenly she was staring and listening with round eyes, her face propped between thumb and finger, cigarette held in that same hand and smoke lifting lazily into the air. It reminded him of the night he sat in a Eurotean courtyard with Meiji.

And she reminded him even more of his mother. She was twenty-six, and, after inquiring further, he found out she was born in the spring of 1913. Not long after Beatrice died. He let himself coast idly along that impossible possibility, even while completely aware that he had let Taki's gods too far inside his head.

Through his silences she inferred where he was. And what he was putting off. He did all but confess that the only thing holding him back was his vow to his sister.

She took a pull on the cigarette and reflected. Feeling heavy again, feeling vaguely as though he had nothing left to lose, Klaus threw back another drink. Her voice, when she spoke again, was different.

‘There’s worse things than death, though,’ she said. ‘And if you really know, and I mean if you _really_ know, that dying is the only option left that makes any kind of sense, then you have to do it, right?’

Klaus found himself staring again. The bizarreness of the conversation didn't quite register. It seemed perfectly natural. He had the sense that she was suddenly a lot older than she was. And he felt, and wondered if she felt it too, that they had known each other for a long time. In a different life.

Another click and another cigarette was lit.

‘If you want to be with her so much that –’

‘Him,’ Klaus said, quietly but unexpectedly.

A small, almost intangible lift of her eyebrows. And she kept going as though she had heard nothing strange.

‘If you want to be with him so much that your entire life, from here on out, will be about trying to find him, that’s not much of a life, is it?’

He noticed she tended to end her sentences with a question. She paused thoughtfully, as though gathering together something she had thought about for a long time.

‘The way I see it, we were brought into the world without really being given a say. So it’s our choice whether or not we want to leave it. It’s only fair that we have at least that choice, don’t you think? Some days it’s an easy choice. Other days it’s not. But in the end, whichever decision you make, it’s always been _yours_ to make, hasn't it? Even though people will try to tell you otherwise.’

The words swilled around in his head along with the scotch. He thought of how he had pressed his lips to Claudia’s hands. How he had given her his right to choose. _Had_ he given her his right to choose?

He had given his right to choose, he had given all of his rights, his entire destiny, to Taki. And now he couldn’t be sure where it was. Whether it was in his hands again.

‘I hope you’re leaving children behind, though,’ she said, her tone switching back to normal and her eyes simmering in the dim bar light. ‘Shame for a looker like you to just off himself without a trace, you know?’

A playful cadence, one that Klaus found immediately soothing, that made the darkness of the subject matter seem both more real and more surreal.

He smiled and looked at her again. He let his eyes roam freely, and slightly drunkenly, over her soft features. The small hands. The kohl lining her lovely eyes. He let himself imagine what it might be like.

‘My nephew looks just like me,’ he said finally.

‘Do you have his phone number?’ she said smoothly, without skipping a beat.

Klaus’ smiled widened.

‘He’s thirteen.’

‘I can wait.’

At that, Klaus finally laughed for the first time that he could remember.

She seemed pleased at his reaction.

‘You should do that more often,’ she said. ‘It suits you.’

Klaus’ smile flickered. The words summoned a riverbank and a lanky figure with red hair. He had said those same words once to Hans Regenwalde.

He wondered, in that moment, whether he had somehow, at some point, become more like Hans. Cold. Unfeeling. A product of suffering.

After watching the shift in his features, she realised that she had misstepped. He was suddenly closed to her even though she had thought, just for a moment, that he might have been open.

The next morning dawned brighter than the one before, just slightly. His head ached and he knew he oughtn’t get in the cockpit with a hangover but something about his encounter the previous night, the strange and unreal conversation he'd had with the dark, pretty girl who offered to write his biography, sent him to the airfield before he even had a chance to get coffee.

The _Sagi_ took off and headed for a small island nation in the south.

He realised just after he took off that he hadn’t once asked the young woman for her name.

* * *

In that country – a country where the girl whose name he didn’t know would return to marry her sullen, serious betrothed – the people were all dark-skinned like her and they smiled often, especially at him. Their language was a ponderous, broken, bubbling stream. He would lie under palm trees on soft white sand and wonder how the ocean had chosen a colour so turquoise and so clear. And at night he would walk near railroad tracks under the halo of streetlamps and throw food scraps at the hungry strays that lurked beneath still carriages.

The news about what was happening in the far east even reached that little tear-drop shaped island. Rumours about the emperor’s dictatorial reign. The riots and protests that were smothered. The growing number of armed conflicts between the military and civilians.

Klaus sighed. It seemed to follow on his heels. On the tail of his plane. A small voice he ignored and managed to outrun for entire months at a time.

By then, more than half a year had passed since he had left the cottage behind. Almost a full year since Taki's death. It took him a few weeks after the fact to realise that he had turned thirty-six and that the day had slid past him without him even noticing. He thought of Wolfsbane with a pang. How Taki had brought him to the short front gate to surprise him on his thirtieth birthday.

He had gone everywhere in search of Taki.

Everywhere but the east, where part of Taki was, encased in a stone shrine in a little green cave of canopy. Everywhere but the cottage in the west where the rest of him was, waiting to be buried beneath the soil of the rose garden.

* * *

And so, after nine months, after he combed the whole world in his search, after he had been everywhere he had always dreamed of going and places he had never even imagined, he found himself alone once again in a rose garden in the west.

The _Sagi_ folded tired wings at the end of the makeshift runway nearby. Her orange chrysanthemum was starting to look weathered and there were streaks on her nose and wings.

In the garden, which he had ignored completely for an entire year, the hedges and weeds alike were overgrown and the roses put up a brave front against the elements and without proper care. White roses, all.

Klaus knelt on the ground beside the bench where he and Taki had once shared the midnight hour wrapped in the diamond-patterned quilt from their bed. He removed the soil gently beneath the rose bushes in a long, even, shallow trench.

He carefully tipped Taki’s ashes into it.

He then covered it back up with earth.

He buried his rose in the soil like he had done once in his youth. And the tears that he shed then were simple and aching.

* * *

Afterwards, he walked into the bedroom that had lengthened and deepened and taken on that blue of grief every time he thought about it. It seemed smaller than he remembered. Silent and still with a mild air of neglect. Like it had been waiting for him to come home.

He thought about how he had given his life and his destiny to Taki, who had left him. He thought about the vow he had made to Claudia, who took his choice from him. He thought about the girl with the kohl-lined eyes from a teardrop-shaped island who gave him his choice back. He wondered what all of it, what any of it, meant.

In his hand was a large clump of letters that had piled up over the past half-year. He went through them absently, tossing one after the other to the floor without opening them.

There was one addressed to him in unfamiliar handwriting. It bore the crest of the triple-leafed rose and made his heart still for a moment.

He opened the letter from the Fifteenth Armoured Division, signed at the bottom by Division Commander Haruki Yamamoto.

Without reading it, he let the letter fall to the floor with the rest of the envelopes. He then climbed into bed and slept for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _***A random little tangent AU:** While Klaus was in the desert, he hallucinated a prince. A little prince. A little blonde prince from a far-away planet who was in love with a rose. And the prince became friends with this pilot who was stranded in the desert, a prince who taught him so much and who died and left him so suddenly that he grieved all over again._
> 
> It's been a day since I posted the above chapter, and I was proofreading it just now when I realised that Klaus-in-the-desert closely resembles the beginning and the backdrop of _The Little Prince_ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which is quite literally my favourite book in the entire world. The pilot, the prince, the rose - how did I not make the MR/Little Prince connection before now?! Anyway, if you haven't already read it, please please please find and read _The Little Prince_ \- you won't regret it.


	47. Kolya and Kaiser

_ONE MONTH LATER_

The very few people Klaus could handle seeing – Claudia, Rudi, Verner, occasionally the Fritzes – had a key to the cottage. So he never saw the point of answering the door on the rare occasion that someone knocked. Sometimes he had the excuse of being down the hall in bed. Other times he was in the kitchen where it would take just a few steps. Either way, he didn’t once answer it. And the knockers always gave up after a short time.

So he found himself getting more and more incensed when this particular knocker, on a cold autumn morning, refused to leave his front door alone.

After several minutes, including a pause in the middle where he heard the visitor step to the front windows as though trying to peer in past the curtains that were always drawn, Klaus let out an angry sigh. He downed the rest of his brandy-laced coffee with his left hand – his right arm was still out of order – and walked heavily to the front door.

He swung it open with an irate ‘What?’ and blinked for a moment in the light that rarely made it into the cottage.

And found himself staring at an Easterner he had never seen before. Early twenties, a lean face with harshly slanted eyebrows, and a military uniform. His pins identified him as a captain.

‘Who are you?’ Klaus said in a language he hadn’t spoken in over a year.

The stranger took in Klaus’ appearance in something like wry shock. His eyes travelled over the shabby flannel shirt, the cast on his right arm, the weeks’ worth of stubble and the dry, brittle hair that fell over bloodshot eyes. The scar on Klaus’ face was new to him, too.

‘God,’ he said dully. ‘You look like shit.’

Klaus glared and squinted.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he repeated.

‘Fukushima,’ the man replied, seemingly oblivious to the waves of hostility flowing his way. ‘Ryoumei. We met a long time ago.’

A name that came to him out of the blurry, shapeless past.

‘Haruki’s old roommate?’

Ryoumei seemed slightly surprised. ‘Didn’t expect you to remember.’

His features suddenly seemed familiar to Klaus. By the looks of it, the former cadet had finally found a comb.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Can I come in?’

There was a small, tense pause.

‘I’m busy,’ Klaus said gruffly.

Ryoumei gave him a look that said he very much doubted it.

‘It’s important,’ he said, with a sort of quiet but pointed insistence.

Klaus stood there and tried, in his slightly addled state, to assess.

The wheat fields beyond Ryoumei’s shoulder had been harvested and were weeks overdue for planting. The paint on the short front gate was cracked and peeling. He hadn’t tended to anything except the rose garden, which he maintained scrupulously. He was itching to go back and sit between the hedges again with a cup of something strong.

His hand remained on the doorknob. He was on the point of making another excuse and simply closing the door.

But in that moment he succumbed to the vaguely fatalistic, resigned feeling that the east would find its way in somehow and that Ryoumei Fukushima was simply its latest emissary.

So he moved back slightly and Ryoumei stepped past him into the cottage.

Klaus tried to see the living room through the eyes of a stranger. He saw the dust and the few scattered bottles and the glass or two propped on the couch armrest. He also noticed how dark it was. He went to one of the front windows and pulled back the curtains about halfway. Pale morning light trickled in uncertainly.

‘What’d you do to your arm?’

‘Broke it.’

Ryoumei sat on one of the armchairs and ploughed ahead with his questions, again either oblivious to or unworried about Klaus’ obvious reluctance to talk.

‘How’d you break it?’

Klaus threw him a sharp, irritated look.

‘Fell off the roof.’

‘That must have hurt.’

Ryoumei’s face and tone were almost expressionless.

Despite wanting to sit, despite wanting to reach again for the last few vials of morphine he had left, Klaus remained standing guardedly by the mantelpiece beside an empty urn. He eyed his visitor with contempt.

* * *

In the month since he returned from his travels, after finally having accepted the simple fact of Taki’s death, he had emerged onto yet new ground. It was a place where he was trapped between the vow he had made to Claudia and the voice in the back of his head that told him otherwise.

While alcohol made that little voice a little louder, morphine simply cast a warm, soothing blanket over everything. It dulled the voice and the memories.

He had his fall from the roof, where he had been re-shingling after a thunderstorm, to thank for it.

After his arm was treated and cast, Klaus had framed his request for extra vials of morphine as a casual, personal favour, owing to the long trek between the cottage and the hospital. He had held his breath in the consultation room, wondering whether Claudia had warned Hesse of his old habits. So when the doctor puffed out a cloud of cigarette smoke and acquiesced, Klaus was greatly relieved.

There wasn’t much, so he paced it out. Every few days, just for a few hours. It gave him something to look forward to. Little beacons in the snow, lit up every few klicks, leading to a place he couldn't yet see.

By then, he had already given Wolfsbane to Rudi as a gift. The horse had been cared for by either Rudi or his father for over half a year and Klaus didn’t have the heart to ask for him back. Besides, his memories of Taki surprising him with Wolfsbane sprang to mind each time he saw the horse. He also couldn’t shake the memory of Wolfsbane’s agitated harrumphs over his shoulder the day Taki collapsed in the stable. It was with a strange knot of feelings in his stomach that Klaus petted the stallion one last time, only six years old and still magnificent, and left him in the stable beside Verner’s chestnut mare to whom the stallion had grown rather attached. That day in the stable, before Klaus returned to the cottage, it seemed Rudi had been on the point of saying something before losing his nerve.

That was also the day Klaus began talking to Taki.

‘Gave Wolfsbane away today,’ he said aloud in the rose garden. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

Silence and wind.

‘I think he’s working on something with the chestnut mare, so he probably won’t miss us that much.’

A few of the roses dipped in the breeze. Klaus imagined Taki’s ashes beneath the soil, spreading into the roots and leaves and stems, into the petals white and soft and rich and red. He would spend hours with Taki there, either with a bottle or with a vial in hand.

His mind was there again, in the rose garden, as he waited for Ryoumei to say whatever he had come all the way to the west to say. As the seconds lengthened, Klaus was close to telling Ryoumeki to spit it out.

‘You need to come back to the Fifteenth,’ Ryoumei said, before Klaus had the chance.

It was said in that same frank, expressionless tone from earlier.

Klaus held his gaze. He was on the point of a scathing reply when a different thought occurred to him.

‘Did Haruki send you?’

‘No. The opposite, actually. He’d kill me if he knew I came here. Good thing I don’t answer to him.’

Klaus’ confusion grew.

‘You don’t work for the division?’

‘I’m an instructor at the fighter jet training base. Different province. But Haruki keeps me in the loop about what he's dealing with. The rebels are getting bolder. You've probably heard of them - the ones that call themselves _Hitobito no Shori._  No one knows how bad it's getting, of course. Tachibana’s got us all quiet and smiling to the press.’

Klaus’ head throbbed from the brandy he had swallowed with his coffee. It was clear by then that Ryoumei was, in fact, the latest emissary. His was a narrative Klaus had been outrunning for months.

‘How the hell am I supposed to help?’ Klaus pointed out, voicing the foremost thought that had allowed him to rationally ignore it.

‘It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. All the divisions need all the help they can get. Especially before the next war breaks out.’

Klaus shot him a cynical look.

‘You travelled for three days to hunt someone down in the west just because it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation?’

A brief pause followed where Ryoumei looked like he suspected his ruse would be seen through.

‘Okay, look. They need someone like you. Haruki needs someone like you. We still remember everything you did in the last war.’

A short, humourless laugh.

‘I’m not the Mad Dog anymore.’

‘Haruki already has one of those.’

It took Klaus a second to recall something about a dog that waited for Haruki at the gates of the compound. He lifted a corner of his mouth.

‘You mean Kaiser.’

‘No, I mean Kolya di Lupo.’

Klaus’ smile vanished.

‘Who?’

‘He used to be a soldier in the Eurotean army. Haruki met him in Eurote about a year ago. Kolya’s his bodyguard now.’

‘Why does the kid need a bodyguard?’

‘Because the _Hitobito_ tried to kill him a few months ago. And nearly did.’

Klaus blinked. The thought of anyone being out to hurt Haruki made his skin prickle. He remembered the kid who had crouched over his lap in the middle of an air raid, his hands clamped over his ears.

‘Why?’

‘You remember how the Fifteenth was in a strategic position during the last war? They are again with the civil war. It’s like they’re cursed. They’re right in a hotbed of unrest – the _Hitobito_ presence is strongest in towns and cities near the compound. They’re under more fire than any other division in the east. And Wolfpup’s known to everyone in the region as the beloved commander. He’s a prime target.’

There was a pause where Ryoumei watched Klaus’ face and noticed that his new line of attack was working.

‘Haruki got out with a few second-degree burns on his back and arm. Spent a long time in the infirmary.’

A muscle twitched in Klaus’ jaw.

‘So the Brass decided to give him protection. He doesn’t need a Mad Dog or another bodyguard.’ Ryoumei’s tone changed slightly. ‘What he needs is someone who understands the lay of the land near the compound. Someone with real combat experience and strategic know-how. What he needs is Taki-sama.’

The name rang out in the empty house.

Klaus’ eyes flashed dangerously. But Ryoumei maintained his steady gaze.

‘You’re the next best thing.’

* * *

A few hours later, Klaus sat down once again in the rose garden. This time, instead of a bottle or a vial, he held Haruki’s letter in his hand. The sky was a grey quilt of clouds and the air carried the intermingled scent of flowers and impending rain.

_Klaus,_

_I hope you can forgive the fact that I am writing at all._

_I have tried writing this letter out several times. Each time I began to try to express my condolences, I always fell woefully short. In the end, I don’t think anyone can understand or pretend to empathise with your suffering. I’m so sorry, Klaus. All I can do is tell you that the entire nation grieved his loss and continues to do so, as do I._

_I’m writing despite being fully aware of how wrong it is of me to already add to an unimaginable burden. In fact, I have a strong feeling that this letter will end up being unsent, just like the others I've tried to write to you._

When Klaus first read those words a few hours earlier, he had the bizarre sensation he was reading his own. He remembered the second letter he had once sent to Claudia, the one he had sent against his better judgment. He kept reading.

_In the year since I’ve been made Commander, things have happened that I didn't foresee. Things that I continue to feel conflicted about. I never thought there would come a day when duty and honour are at odds, but I feel like that's where we are now._

_I find myself wondering what Taki-sama would have done. I can’t help but feel as though every move I make is something he wouldn’t have done, or that every move I don’t make is one he would have taken. My men don’t see this uncertainty and it is all I can do to keep it from them. I also wonder how things might be different if you were here; whether your advice and your experience might change anything. It might sound strange, maybe even baseless, but it’s a thought I have quite often._

_Even though an old promise and my duty to my people are telling me to do so, I can’t ask anything of you. The only thing stronger than my wish that you were here is my hope that you’re alright._

_Please send my regards to Claudia and Rudi._

_Haruki Yamamoto_  
_Commander_  
_Fifteenth Armoured Division_

The letter Haruki didn’t think he would send. Klaus wondered what had changed his mind. Perhaps it was Ryoumei. Or perhaps a voice in his head, like the one that Klaus had listened to before he sent his second letter.

He sat in the grass between the rose hedges and scanned the letter again, trying to read between the lines. He knew censorship was at an all-time high and he wondered how Haruki had managed to get even a letter such as that past the border, as vague as he was about the details. Thanks to Ryoumei, Klaus also understood the nature of the situation. The fight against their own people. Duty and honour at odds.

He looked up at the flowers, at the dozens of roses that would hang on until the end of autumn, and asked Taki what he should do.

A few hours earlier, when Ryoumei was still in the living room, Klaus had lapsed into a long silence before asking him something that still didn't make sense.

‘Why are _you_ here? You’re not even stationed at the compound.’

Ryoumei sighed and scuffed the back of his head. His hair stuck up just slightly like it did when he was a cadet.

‘Haruki isn’t an airhead like he used to be but, no matter how much I tried to beat it out of him over the years, the guy still has a heart of gold. Really goddamn annoying sometimes. I kept telling him to try to get you to come back, but he refused. Said he couldn’t do it while you were grieving.’

Again, the words echoed hollowly. Ryoumei glanced at the urn on the mantel which feebly caught the half-light.

‘So I took time away from the base just to come here and do what he should have done. I haven’t seen my wife in weeks but here I am in the middle of fucking nowhere trying to recruit you.’ He made a face at himself. ‘Maybe I’m the one with a heart of gold.’

Something seemed to occur to him.

‘He did send you a letter once, the one time he took my advice. You ever get it?’

Klaus thought about the letter still sitting somewhere on the floor of his room, opened but unread.

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. Now you have his words and mine. I hope you give it some thought.’

There was a pause after which Ryoumei got to his feet, feeling like he had done everything he could, more or less. He cast the shabby living room another glance before heading for the door.

‘Don’t tell him I came here.’

Klaus, meanwhile, remained near the fireplace, staring resolutely at the floor.

_Everything I touch…_

The thought occurred to him that the kid would be better off without him. How could he be sure that the gods wouldn't follow on his tail and bring further woe to the division and its new young commander?

‘Also,’ Ryoumei said at the door. ‘If you do decide to come back, get a shave and a haircut first.’

After he left, Klaus went to the bedroom and found Haruki’s letter. He then slowly walked with it down the back steps into the garden. He stayed there for several hours.

‘I don’t know,’ he told Taki.

His legs stretched out before him, one knee bent. He had turned the letter over to reread Haruki’s final few lines. He sighed and glanced up, his hair whipping about in the wind.

_I don’t want to leave you._

‘What should I do?’

The corner of the page was caught in a gust and folded over his hand. The three-leafed rose emblem was splayed against his knuckle. He stared at the crest. The pointed leaves. The bright, fierce rose at the centre. Rosen Maiden.

And he found himself remembering his words to Grand Chamberlain Hasebe, words that were uttered in a dank cell while he sat in a chair, bruised and bleeding.

_I am Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt. Member of the Rosen Maiden Fifteenth Armoured Division. And the one and only knight of Division Commander Taki Reizen._

When he decided, it was less a moment of startling epiphany and more like the gentle feel of fingers running through his hair.

‘You sure?’ he asked, with the smallest hint of irony. ‘I’m a one-master kind of dog.’

But he knew he had decided. Or rather, that the decision had been made for him. He breathed in the smell of petals and slowly let it out in an inaudible sigh. 

A week later, the last thing he did before he left the cottage was to leave a bowl of dry cat food by the back door, just in case.

* * *

He went to the capital late at night, after Wilhelm and the children had already retired. Claudia opened the door to her little brother, who had come unannounced, and felt a strange tightness in her chest.

He sat at the kitchen table and put his bag on the floor. She hovered nearby, wondering what he was about to tell her.

‘Claudia,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

And suddenly they were nine years younger, having the same conversation in a different kitchen. Claudia was wide-eyed. Her heart pounded.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the east.’

‘Why? When?’

‘Today. My train leaves in a few hours.’ He paused. ‘Last time I said I probably wouldn’t be coming back, remember? That didn’t turn out to be the case. So don’t worry, I’ll be back this time too.’

Claudia repeated her first question.

‘You remember Haruki Yamamoto?’ Klaus asked.

‘Haruki?’

She recalled a bright smile and kind, startling eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly.

‘The kid might need my help. I don’t know how much good it’ll do for him to have me there, but… I’m going anyway.’

Claudia needed a second to process. The tightness in her chest fell away, replaced by something else.

She struggled to understand why the thought of Klaus leaving behind the peacefulness of the cottage for all the uncertainties and dangers in the east should have sparked so much hope in her. It seemed wildly counter-intuitive.

‘I think I feel responsible for him, somehow,’ said Klaus ruminatively. It was something he hadn’t even fully thought about yet. ‘I remember a few things from when he was a cadet. How he asked to keep my gun so he could learn to be more like me and Taki. I feel like it’s because of me that he’s still there.’ He then glanced at her with a self-deprecating air. ‘I’m probably taking too much credit. As usual.’

Claudia remembered their brief few minutes of interaction she had observed over a year ago. She chose her words carefully.

‘I don’t think you are. What was that call sign of his? Little Wolf?’

‘Wolfpup,’ said Klaus with a smile.

‘You see?’

In the amused, meaningful little pause that ensued, Klaus and Claudia stared at one another. The years seemed to stretch away behind them, their childhoods and the past few years mingled as one.

And then Claudia moved to him and kissed his forehead again, like she had done once a long time ago.

‘Take care of yourself, Klaus,’ she said. ‘And your pup, too.’

He gave a small chuckle.

‘I will.’

* * *

The train whistle blew. A few stragglers boarded at the last second.

Klaus took his time walking alongside the train. He glanced skyward at the moonlight-streaked clouds. He found himself hoping for a few drops to fall. So it would mimic the first time he had boarded a train to the east.

He glanced ahead at one of the carriages.

‘You stood there, remember?’ he said softly as he walked beside the long line of yellow paint drawn beneath carriage windows. ‘Right there. Your hair and clothes were wet. It looked like you had waited for me until the last minute. Then right before you stepped onto the train, you heard my footsteps. And then you turned. And…’

 _And the look on your face,_ he told Taki silently. _I’ll never forget it until my dying day._

‘What went through your mind when I took your hand?’

Taki didn't reply.

 _Take me with you_. _It’s simple. You just have to make me yours._ The train had waited beside them for Taki to make the decision that changed both their lives.

‘I wonder if you knew,’ Klaus said. ‘How much would happen.’

The clouds were poised but the air was still. Rain wouldn’t fall on that crisp, clear night. Klaus went to that same carriage and climbed on board at the same moment that the train jolted away.

* * *

_THREE DAYS LATER_

He kept an eye out, almost guiltily, but for the most part, the Eastern Country hadn't changed.

He listened to the chattering of those who passed. A sound like the warbling of birds, a sound he had heard once beneath laburnums. He passed shrines, signs written in kanji, the soft, muted jade of trees unique to that land. It all seemed the same. Whatever insidious forces were working in the east were hidden for the moment.

He was let through the familiar front gates of the compound without any of the suspicion he had expected. If anything, the soldiers on duty had permeated a kind of silent reverence. He wondered why.

After hearing his rank and name, one of the soldiers gave him a quick, clipped report of the state of the compound. It had been several weeks since the last time they engaged in conflict with the  _Hitobito._ When Klaus asked, the lieutenant gravely admitted that an outbreak could occur at any point.

The grounds of the Fifteenth Armoured Division had changed a bit in the nine years since he had last seen it. As he walked past the square, he observed with some interest the new tanks that had been added in a new row alongside the old. They were sleeker and more angular. More barracks had been added where there was only empty space before.

He noted with a little regret that some of the elements that had made it the Reizen winter residence – trees and courtyards – had been sacrificed, most likely when it was transformed into a permanent military compound. He was pleased, however, to see the single cherry blossom tree still standing at the very centre of the complex, though it was bare in the autumn chill. He wondered what had become of his shed.

After asking around, he found out the division commander was doing a demonstration for cadets in the auditorium. When he rounded the corner, he was a little surprised to see a dog lying on the front step in front of the auditorium entrance.

It perked its head and ears up in almost hyperbolic vigilance when Klaus approached. Klaus felt his face stretch into the first real smile he could remember.

‘You must be Kaiser.’

The dog was a beauty. Reaching Klaus’ knee when it stood up, it appeared to be a mix between a shepherd and a collie. Long silky black coat with flecks of tan and white on its chest and slender muzzle.

Kaiser pressed his nose into Klaus’ hand. Alert, intelligent eyes assessed the newcomer.

‘We’re from the same place, buddy. You can trust me.’ He ran his hand along the dog’s flank. ‘Where’s your master?’

He left his bag beside Kaiser, who promptly sat down, ears still cocked, when it became clear Klaus was about to enter the auditorium. He pushed the door open.

A few dozen cadets lined the bench along the auditorium wall, riveted by the action in the centre of the floor. The first thing Klaus observed was a whirl of black and white. The clack of shinai on shinai. Though there were two figures sparring, all eyes were drawn to the smaller of the pair. The one in black and white, hair flying, his reflexes lightning fast.

Klaus felt a painful surge in his gut. From that distance, he could have sworn it was Taki he was watching.

But the longer he watched, the more it became clear that the similarities with Taki ended at the physical. His fencing moves were almost entirely Klaus’.

_The kid could be our son._

With a small smile, he leaned against the doorway of the auditorium, remembering how he had done the same thing years ago in that exact spot.* He also realised drily, incredulously, that his arm had also been in a sling at the time, though it had been the left, not the right.

And just like he had that day, he watched Haruki Yamamoto resoundingly defeat his opponent. The much taller and more solidly built challenger lost his balance on a particularly lethal cross-strike and ended up on the floor, facing the end of Haruki’s outstretched shinai.

‘Not bad, kid.’

Haruki’s heart leapt to his throat at the familiar, immensely deep voice. He spun around.

As though he had been peeled from a ten-year-old memory, Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt leaned in the doorway, tan coat and all, his arm in a white sling.

And Kaiser sat by his feet.

‘Klaus?’ Haruki said, in quiet disbelief.

‘Azusa was right. You fight like a vicious pup.’

As he walked into the auditorium, the row of cadets stood and saluted, though they had no way of knowing Klaus was an officer. A little amused, Klaus threw them a quick, ‘As you were’.

‘Klaus,’ Haruki repeated, panting, sweat still hanging from his fringe. ‘What – what are you doing here?’

Just as the opponent Haruki had defeated got to his feet behind him, Klaus drew close and cast an appraising glance over the young commander. He wore a kendogi like Taki’s, with its white top half and billowing black lower half. His face was both flushed and glowing with the adrenaline of combat. It was a look Klaus knew well.

‘Say the word and I’ll come running, remember?’ Klaus said airily, recalling a train platform and a cloud of white steam issuing from the engine. ‘Sorry it took me so long, kid.’

For a moment, Haruki could only stare, still breathing heavily from the spar. He urged his heartbeat to settle.

It had been over a year since he had seen Klaus. He seemed to have aged more in that one year than in the seven years prior, as though life had weathered him down. His eyes and hair seemed duller somehow. Drained of colour, like Haruki had seen once in the aftermath of his exile.

But it didn’t matter. It was Klaus. Back in the east, back in the compound. Because of him.

The flush on his face deepened when he remembered the words he had put in his letter to Klaus. For months when he didn’t hear back, he was almost relieved in the thought that Klaus had never even opened it. And now…

He struggled to put his gratitude in words. Klaus regarded him with that familiar simmering gaze.

‘I – I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say that my shed’s still standing somewhere. I could sleep for days after that train ride.’

A small flare in Haruki’s chest. ‘Are you… staying?’

‘For however long you need me,’ said Klaus, thinking of Claudia’s last words to him. ‘If that’s okay, Commander.’

Haruki’s smile started hesitantly, as though he hadn't yet caught up, but it spread to his eyes before long. Klaus realised then that Taki, as usual, had made the right call.

It was around that time that Klaus’ attention focused properly on the man who had gotten to his feet behind Haruki and had been listening silently to their conversation. To Klaus’ mild surprise, he found he had to stare straight ahead to meet the man’s gaze. He couldn’t remember the last time he had met someone as tall as he was.

Wearing a soldier’s uniform with his buttons loosened for the spar, the man was fair with close-cropped hair, light-brown, that fell in blunt spikes just past his hairline. A huge shoulder span and pendulous fists held by his sides. Green eyes stared from beneath straight, uncompromising eyebrows. His unsmiling expression seemed locked in place.

Klaus couldn’t pin his age but he guessed somewhere in the early thirties.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked lightly.

‘Oh,’ Haruki said, stepping aside. ‘Klaus, this is Private First Class Lupo. Kolya, this is Captain Wolfstadt.’

Klaus gave the Eurotean a vaguely mistrustful once-over. He felt like he was on the receiving end of a similar stare.

Haruki’s own Mad Dog, he thought.

After a short pause, Kolya sharply saluted his superior officer. His gaze, intense and impassive at the same time, didn’t alter even a little.

Klaus was on the point of saying, ‘As you were,’ like he did with the cadets. But, on a strange impulse, he instead said, ‘At ease,’ which forced Kolya to stand somewhat stiffly with his hands behind his back.

He didn’t know that Kolya was privately seething over the fact that Klaus, a mere captain, felt he could address the commander with so much familiarity and no modicum of respect. By then, they were already speaking of the Saxon’s broken arm, which he assured Haruki would only take another few weeks to heal completely. They then discussed the Saxon’s sleeping quarters. Each time the Saxon addressed Haruki as ‘kid’, Kolya felt his irritation growing. None of his antipathy, however, showed on his face.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Klaus said in response to Haruki offering to go with him. ‘I remember where the shed is, trust me. Go back to kicking Kolya’s ass.’

He wondered if he saw a flicker cross Kolya’s features over the casual use of his first name. He gave Haruki a swift, familiar wink and turned on his heel.

Haruki watched him leave.

* * *

The door of the shed swung open with a creak that Klaus didn’t recall it having before, but one he felt like he could relate to.

A whole decade, he thought.

It was strangely akin to the moment when he returned from his travels to the bedroom in the cottage. But the shed held none of that lingering, grief-engraved blue. Aside from being slightly smaller than he remembered, it was exactly the same as it had always been. The same bed was still there, as was his desk and wardrobe. It smelled of wood and dust.

The only change he could see, aside from the thick layer of dust on the floor, was the scattering of tools and metal parts on his desk.

He closed the door gently behind him and sat on the bed, right up against the headboard, with his head braced back on the wall. The sheets seemed fairly fresh, as though they had been changed only a few weeks ago. He felt like he could drop off right there, coat and boots still on.

After some time passed, he was contemplating getting up to unpack when there came a faint knock on the door.

‘Yes?’  
  
‘It’s me. Sorry, I wasn’t sure whether you’d already gone to sleep.’

A slow smile.  
  
‘Come to ask if you can borrow my gun?’

There was a brief pause after which Haruki smiled too. He was fourteen again, knocking on the door to the shed, worried the captain had already turned in. It seemed the past would keep rising up to meet them that day.

He opened the door when Klaus told him to come in. Kaiser went in ahead of him.

‘You still remember?’ said Haruki.

‘’Course I do.’

Klaus knew he only remembered that day so clearly because of what he had been doing to Taki at the time.

But when Kaiser bounded onto the bed, that bitter memory didn’t get a chance to surface completely. As though the past twenty minutes was all the time Kaiser had needed to make a decision regarding the newcomer, he made a beeline for Klaus’ face, tail wagging furiously, paws sinking a little painfully onto his lap.

Klaus laughed behind the sudden assault of wet nose and tongue.  
  
‘Kaiser!’ Haruki said sharply. His tone was clipped and commanding; one Klaus hadn’t heard from him before. ‘Sorry, he’s not usually like that. I don’t know what’s gotten into him.’  
  
‘It’s alright.’ Klaus ran his good hand through the thick fur of the dog’s neck and chest. ‘I’ve always wanted a dog. Only ever grew up with cats for some reason.’  
  
Haruki, a little relieved, stood on the inside of the doorway watching them. He felt grateful yet again that Klaus was there at all.  
  
Klaus waved aside all apologies for the dusty state of the shed and all offers for the bed to be remade by the maids.  
  
‘This is fine, believe me. I don’t think I changed the sheets back in the cottage for months.’  
  
At that, Haruki’s pulse picked up just a little. He had spent a good portion of the last year wondering about Klaus. Unwashed sheets was only a microcosm but it was more than he knew before.  
  
Klaus saw the expression change on Haruki’s face. He watched him hesitate for a few moments and it brought about a small sense of foreboding.  
  
‘I’m so sorry, Klaus,’ Haruki said finally, in a low, quiet echo of his letter. ‘About Taki-sama.’  
  
One thing Klaus had learned over the past year was that he hated hearing others speak Taki’s name.

Silence fell in the shed.   
  
Klaus looked at the former cadet turned commander. He had changed out of the kendogi into his green military uniform, tied about the waist with a familiar black belt. His jacket stretched across wide shoulders. Klaus found he was mildly surprised again at how much Haruki had grown.  
  
Haruki, who was one of the few who knew about Klaus and Taki. One of the few who had seen Taki in his final days. It left Klaus feeling a strange combination of numbness and pain.  
  
‘Thanks, kid,’ he said finally.  
  
They both heard how tired he sounded.  
  
‘I’m surprised the shed’s still like this,’ said Klaus, swiftly changing the subject. ‘It’s like I never left.’  
  
‘There was talk years ago of turning it into a storage room but Uemura never got around to it. When I was promoted, I kept it as it is. The maids even clean it from time to time.’  
  
‘You were that sure I'd come back, huh?’  
  
Haruki suddenly seemed a little awkward. ‘No actually, I... I used to use it. The shed I mean.’  
  
‘What for?’  
  
Again Haruki hesitated. But there was also a hint of excitement in his eyes.  
  
‘Can I show you something? If you’re not too tired.’  
  
‘Sure.’  
  
Haruki led him around the side of the shed where there was a big hunkering mass covered in a tarp. He pulled the cover off and Klaus found himself staring at his old bike.  
  
‘I fixed it up over the past year,’ Haruki explained. ‘I built the wireless right into the sidecar so you don’t have to rig it up anymore. Plus a few of the parts needed changing over the years so I’d work on them in the shed and put it all together out here. I didn’t ride it much, though. Only to test her and see how she’s running.’

Klaus then understood the small scattering of equipment on his desk. He ran a hand over the handlebars and seat, already hearing the roar of the tires beneath him. It looked better than ever.

‘You're full of surprises, kid.’

He turned to meet a pleased, slightly embarrassed smile. Eyes and browline that reminded him of Taki. But a different mouth and jaw.

'Kolya helped with some of it. He used to ride as well, back in Eurote.'

Klaus' smile faltered a little at the mention of the Eurotean. He ran an absent hand over Kaiser's head.

'How did you meet him, anyway?'

'In the middle of a military operation in Eurote. He was a private in Rossi's army.'

'Why’d he come back with you?'

'It's a long story.'

For the first time since Klaus had known him, Haruki seemed a little guarded. He had the distinct feeling Haruki was protective of Kolya.

'I heard he's your bodyguard.'

Haruki wondered how Klaus knew.

'Something like that. Headquarters kicked up a fuss after an attack on one of our convoys a few months ago. I appointed Kolya just to pacify them.'

'Is he experienced enough?'

'He's only twenty-six, but he's good.'

Klaus was surprised. ‘I vaguely remember twenty-six,’ he said ironically. He tried not to think of Kolya with envy. ‘He seems older.’

‘Yeah, he’s… Kolya’s been through a lot.’

‘Are you sure you can trust him?’

Haruki’s gaze shifted just slightly. ‘I’d trust him with my life.’

The tone in his voice made Klaus feel another strange stab of emotion that he couldn't immediately identify. He allowed himself a small smile, surprised by the extent of his own unwarranted paternal instincts.

‘I’m beat,’ Klaus realised after they headed back around to the front of the shed. ‘I might knock off for a few hours.’

‘Okay,’ said Haruki, and then hesitated again. ‘There’s… a briefing tomorrow at 0800. General meeting room.’

‘I’ll be there.’

Haruki smiled.

* * *

After Klaus closed the door, Haruki stood on the front step of the shed for only a moment.

He was suddenly thinking back to a day he had spent with the former commander in a cottage in the west.

_‘Haruki. I need to ask a favour.’_

Haruki’s pulse had quickened.

‘Anything, Taki-sama.’

Taki sat up on the couch, his hair caught in a small, somewhat mesmerising ripple on the couch cushions behind him. He seemed to be deep in thought. Haruki waited.

‘After I'm gone,’ Taki began slowly, and Haruki’s heart missed a beat. ‘Klaus will want to stay here. He'll fall back on old habits. He'll... he won't be himself. More than anything else, I’m scared for him.’

Something in Taki's voice and face made Haruki’s gut twist in sadness. In that moment, he saw how powerfully Taki's fear for Klaus superseded what was happening to him.

‘I need you to summon him,’ Taki went on, his tone still slow and undulating, his gaze fixed on Haruki. ‘He cares for you. And he knows he owes you a life debt. Both his own and mine.’

Haruki thought back to a radio transmission he had intercepted, and a farmhouse in No Man's Land where he had pulled the trigger without any idea what he was doing.

‘Taki-sama, that's really not –’

‘Only something as strong as that can pull him back. Call on his sense of duty. It might take him a while, but he'll come.’

Standing on the front step of Klaus' shed, Haruki underwent a strange mix of emotions. None of them clear. But one of them was close to guilt. He didn't know why Klaus and Taki had left everything behind all those years ago, but he suspected it was to escape all of this. And now he had brought Klaus back into the thick of it. Whether he had done so because of Taki or not, he still –

With a quick sigh, Haruki tried to push the guilt away and walked across the courtyard towards his room with Kaiser following closely on his heels.

* * *

Having taken off his coat and boots and eased his arm out of the sling, Klaus lay in bed with his eyes closed and suddenly found he wasn’t as tired as he thought. The shed and the compound were silent around him, with only the bark of a drill sergeant and a whistle punctuating the air every now and then. Dusk was falling and cast a purplish hue through the half-drawn curtains.

He found himself thinking about Kolya and Kaiser and realised sardonically that he was Haruki’s third dog. And the oldest of the lot.

The thought made him smile.

A short gust of wind blew through the window. He had a feeling that autumn would pass by in a blur and winter would find them soon. Winter, which meant Taki’s birthday. He would have turned thirty.

Slowly, Klaus opened his eyes. He breathed in the scent of dried leaves carried through the window. He tried to pick up the scent of something else. He thought of a white hand interlaced with obsidian locks of hair in a field of grass.

A plane flew by overhead with a sudden streak of sound. A fighter jet, by the sounds of it. Once it passed, the world was quiet again.

‘Okay, Taki,’ he murmured aloud. ‘I’m here.’

He stared at the ceiling.

‘What now?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *For a quick refresher on the scene where Klaus watched cadet Haruki sparring, head to the middle of [Chapter 9: Words Like Trust](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5884132/chapters/16009549). (Wow, almost forty chapters ago...)
> 
> Also, for any _Saezuru_ fans, kindly envision Kolya as a green-eyed Italian/Russian Doumeki :)


	48. Curse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy 2017 everyone! Hope you’re all enjoying your summer/winter wherever you are. Earlier I was at the beach and got to perv on a real-life Klaus surfing. (Sometimes I love that I live in Australia lol!)
> 
> Just wanted to say a quick thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy the next three chapters. They're sort of like one long chapter split up for the sake of word length. Apologies for the dryness of the politics in some parts and the slow burn of certain other things.
> 
> Hope you’re enjoying nevertheless! It means so much to have everyone on board, thank you once again for your love and support! Xx

‘Say, Klaus.’

A voice with an echo. It was familiar. Friendly and light. But there was a blade-like edge to it in hindsight, because Klaus knew it was about to recall something he didn’t want to think about.

‘That day. The day everyone scattered and fell…’

Scattered like starlings with a hawk in their midst. Their formation was lost. Their sense of direction was lost. Their leader… their leader was…

‘How did you survive it?’

The voice belonged to Enrico Fermi.[*](http://mangable.com/hyakujitsu_no_bara_dj_luckenwalde_no_heya_de/chapter-8/7/) Long hair falling over his face, his good-natured smile lingering behind his cigarette, he leaned against the wall behind the old man’s cafe next to Klaus, who had just used his own cigarette to light Enrico’s. Taki was within, learning to make coffee. It was only a few months before Taki would be sent back home to the east. Only a few months before Klaus would follow.

And here was Enrico, asking him about the past.

‘There were more and more of them,’ he was saying. ‘The radio was useless. It was… terrifying.’

After a pause, Klaus told him quietly of how he had two of them on his tail. How he had sped on until sea and forest alternated beneath him over and over. How his mind had flown far away. To the white rose of his youth.

The one he had plucked, without thinking, straight from the bush. The one he had quietly buried.

‘Of course you buried it,’ Enrico said, as though he had known all along. ‘You killed it, didn't you? It was your fault.’

A white-hot flash of anger. Klaus stared at Enrico. Enrico, who had suddenly sprouted ears, dog ears, from the top of his head through his hair. And a long, swaying tail that curled around his trouser legs. And yet, none of it seemed strange. Klaus barely noticed it. His head was still clanging from the impact of what Enrico had said. Perhaps he had heard wrong.

‘What are you –?’

‘You led your men into a slaughterhouse in the air and you killed them,’ Enrico continued, rather gently. ‘You led so many men to their deaths. In that war, and in the second one. You turned Hans Regenwalde into a monster and you killed him too.’ His eyes were in the distance, head tilted slightly as though trying to recall trifling facts. ‘His name means _gift from the gods_. Did you know that? He was thrown in your way not once but twice in your life, like the gods were trying to show you how real they were. How real their powers were. The first time was when you were sixteen.’ Enrico paused. ‘He was in love with you, you know. For a long time.’

‘Shut up,’ Klaus hissed.

‘And you killed him. You didn’t even hesitate. You looked him in the eye and you –’

‘I’d do it again.’

‘You _did_ do it again. You killed your rose. You trample all things divine, like you were sent to them just to tear them down.’

Enrico flicked his cigarette, barely smoked, into a nearby puddle between cobblestones. Hands in his pockets, he turned and serenely observed Klaus’ aghast expression. He tilted his head slightly, indicating the café behind them.

‘You killed that little untarnished rose of yours in there.’

The sounds of Taki speaking to the old man wafted through the half-open window. Klaus was struggling to breathe again. He felt his own ears. Wolf-like. His own tail. His cigarette glowed brightly between his fingers.

‘You killed your rose. Just like you’ll kill your pup.’

Klaus stared at Enrico, his old friend, and his rage built like a silent, impotent wave that would crash against nothing. He tried to make his mouth form words. To ask him why he was saying such awful things. Things that hadn’t even happened yet. They were still in Luckenwalde. He hadn’t even touched Taki. There was still time. He would do things differently this time –

‘You’re not cursed, Klaus,’ Enrico told him, his eyes still soft. ‘You _are_ the curse.’

Each time Klaus dreamt of the events Enrico described, the flying and falling and fleeing, Klaus awoke in a sweat, panting. This time, when he dreamed of Enrico himself instead and the slow, gentle, terrible words Enrico had said – things he had never said mingled with things he had – Klaus awoke as though he had gently broken the surface of a dark lake.

He opened his eyes in the shed and the dream filtered away. His chest felt sore, like something had gently burrowed inside it while he slept. It was all gentle. It was all soft, all coaxing and tender. An old friend telling him, quietly and reasonably, that he was a plague on everyone around him.

It took him a moment to remember why he was in his old shed. The light outside was fresh and pale. A little after dawn. Barely twelve hours since he had arrived. He smelled dust and wood.

_You killed your rose._

He slowly got out of bed and knelt by his suitcase. He searched beneath the layers of clothes for the small, flat glass bottle of scotch. And a few layers beneath that was the black satchel bearing the hospital emblem. There were a few vials left. He hadn’t had any since after Ryoumei’s visit. It was all there, complete with the syringe that Hesse, in his sympathy, had let him have.

It was easy to imagine that he was in a smaller version of his bedroom back at the cottage. That there was nothing stretching out around him but empty wheat fields and grass and distant mountains. He was alone. No one watched or knew and he was free to sink again into pale hands and dark hair and eyes deep and glistening that always made him feel small.

He stared at the satchel and heard a short, unspoken reprimand from somewhere he couldn't see.

‘It’ll be just for a few hours,’ he told Taki.

Just for a few hours. Just to help him forget. Just –

_Just like you’ll kill your pup._

And suddenly, like a thumb riffling through a deck of playing cards, there was a new set of images. A flushed face and a grateful smile. Someone who was happy he was here.

When he stood up, his right forearm spiked in pain. He held it still against his chest. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face with his left hand. He ran wet fingers through his hair. He glanced at his shoulders and chest in the mirror above the sink. Though he remained broad and heavy, he had lost some of his muscle tone over the months. He looked, strangely, like he was slouching even when he stood up straight.

And then he glanced up at his face. He felt the same mild surprise he had felt in the barbershop before he boarded the train, when Gustav cleared his face of stubble and gave him a trim. His face even beneath all that was still careworn.

 _You just looked so sad,_ said the dark-skinned woman in a bar in Braxton.

His head hurt. It felt, again, like there was too much there. The weight of the past with all of its warnings and symbols and threats and prophecies and foretelling. There was too much, they were all saying different things, and just one thing, and it all hurt.

So he tried to focus.

_The only thing stronger than my wish that you were here is my hope that you’re alright._

For the moment, the deft, precise lettering of Haruki's hand was clearer than anything else. Haruki had called him. And he had come.

Back in the room, he picked up his watch from the nightstand and almost groaned. It was barely six. There were still over two hours before he was expected anywhere. He allowed himself a small chuckle. He imagined Taki watching him.

‘What, am I supposed to go for a brisk morning jog? Give me a break.’

In the somehow pointed silence, he sighed in resignation. For some reason, he found himself thinking of Kolya di Lupo's impressive physical form. He felt another odd stab of annoyance.

‘Not an old man yet,’ he told himself.

He walked to his desk where the old parts of his bike were still scattered. Stretched along the wall was a long brass handlebar piece, dipped in the centre. He lifted it and tested its weight. Heavier than any shinai.

Outside, the air was much too cold for the thin, short-sleeved shirt he had slept in. The chill seeped into his skin almost immediately. He flexed his injured arm in its sling and took a deep breath. The sound of a large marching drill reverberated through the air and even the ground from elsewhere in the compound.

He twirled the handlebar in his left hand, feeling the muscles of his arm contract and expand trying to accommodate the movement and the weight. He walked to the side of the shed beside the bike hidden beneath the tarp. His breath came out in little flimsy puffs of steam. His blood flowed hotly, trying to warm him up from within. The brass bar spun and whirled at his side, then behind him, then he lifted it up and rested it behind his neck across his shoulders.

He dredged up a grin from a former life.

_I’ll be your partner._

The first lunge into the air with the brass bar reminded him of that bright day in the compound. The spins and whirls of his beautiful young master who, only days before that, had pulled him back from the edge of death.

Two hours later, showered and changed, Klaus caught sight of Kaiser who sat before the open entrance to the main building. He gave the dog a swift pat before walking down the long, familiar hallway. He opened the door to the general meeting room a few minutes shy of eight.

A lot of the officers had already gathered. At the head of the table, Hasebe was speaking softly to Haruki over spread telegrams and maps. Kolya stood a little ways behind Haruki’s chair. Another thin, stiff looking officer hovered at Haruki’s elbow.

All four of them glanced up as Klaus walked in. The less-than-friendly stares of Hasebe, Kolya and the other officer were instantly outdone by the young commander’s smile.

Klaus winked and drew out a chair.

* * *

The briefing was as typical as any Klaus had attended in the past, with the only exception being Haruki’s occasional interjections for Klaus’ benefit.

In addition to paying close attention to the reports and keeping an eye on the projectors which showed aerials of nearby towns, Klaus was also keeping an ear out for the way they spoke about those in the capital.

Headquarters was given its usual faceless, conglomerate status.

But the emperor. With the emperor, people were especially careful.

He noticed that only Aizawa, the thin, upright officer who had taken Hasebe’s place as Grand Chamberlain, had no problem referring to Tachibana with the automatic reverence his title afforded him. Everyone else’s statements concerning the emperor were careful. Almost ginger.

It made Klaus sigh once or twice in annoyance.

‘We’ve received reports of _Hitobito_ threats closer to the capital,’ Aizawa said, handing Haruki a document. A long, thin face with vertical creases running down on either side of his mouth and chin. ‘The Imperial Guard has requested backup from all divisions.’

Haruki’s lips pressed together for a moment.

‘We sent part of the fourth infantry last month,’ he said guardedly. ‘And there hasn’t been a single attack anywhere near palace grounds to date. We’ve been hit hardest and we keep getting hit. I’m sure the emperor is aware of that.’

‘And not having the fourth infantry cost us last time,’ Hasebe added gruffly. ‘We lost men because of how long it took for back-up to reach us.’

‘Be that as it may, sir,’ Aizawa pressed. ‘His Majesty has ordered it.’

‘I don’t see it as an order,’ Haruki countered, his tone careful and his eyes scanning the page, which Klaus presumed was a missive from the palace. ‘It’s framed as a request to all divisions for any men they can spare. We can’t spare any.’

A brief but tense silence fell.

‘Commander –’ Aizawa began uncomfortably.

‘What’s next?’

Haruki placed the missive on the pile to his left and turned to Aizawa, his expression neutral. Aizawa looked for a moment as though he was about to press the matter. Instead, he readjusted his glasses and glanced down at the clipboard in his hands.

Klaus smiled.

He watched Haruki make his way through the rest of Aizawa’s reports with a quiet yet assertive skill he had seen before in that very room. He suddenly wished he had been there whenever Haruki and Taki had spoken together at the cottage. He wondered how much of Taki he was watching now.

He and Suguri, now a Major, had exchanged a brief glance and an even briefer nod when the meeting began. The last time Klaus had seen him had been over a year ago when Suguri wordlessly handed over half of Taki’s ashes. The memory still seared and he found it was painful to look at Suguri for longer than necessary.

He and Hasebe seemed to have barely aged in the past nine years, though Klaus did notice that Suguri seemed slightly more gaunt and Hasebe slightly more portly. Both well into their fifties, as gruff and stern-lipped as ever, they gave all the appearance of having steadfastly held down the fort over the years in Taki’s absence. Klaus had heard that Suguri had been sent home after the war and returned when hostilities began in the past year. Hasebe, however, had never left. After Uemura’s retirement, he had been promoted to Colonel and was now second in command.

Strangely enough, it made Klaus feel a sort of relief that at least Uemura was too old for it all and had retired in time.

* * *

As the meeting progressed, one of Haruki’s lieutenants stepped into the room with a thick file for Klaus. As Aizawa and Hasebe spoke of administrative matters, Klaus silently turned the pages and gathered the grim details of what had befallen the Fifteenth in the past year since Haruki had been made commander.

There had been six incidents in total, three of them particularly brutal. From the rebels they were random acts of violence. They would take out military outposts. They would target convoys and motorcades. Guerrilla tactics. They only wanted to make cracks in the ground beneath Tachibana’s empire.

But the military was responding with merciless brute strength.

The hostilities took place in surrounding towns and cities, as often in rural communities as in populated cities. In addition, the rebels made the first move as often as the military did.

The first incident took place in Hokane, the most populated city nearby, when members of the _Hitobito_ opened fire on a patrol. The Fifteenth had sent in an infantry unit for back-up and only a handful made it back alive.

The second incident was even worse. The fighting took place on the open road bounded by paddy fields. Dozens of civilians were killed in the crossfire. Despite orders from the Brass, Haruki had ordered a retreat before more civilians were hurt. It was a move that cost him at headquarters but endeared him to his men.

The final incident was an attack on a convoy. A direct assassination attempt, by the looks of it. A fire bomb scattered the motorcade and Haruki’s jeep suffered the worst of it.

Klaus' anger kept building as he read the casualty reports. There, in blunt terms, were second-degree burns Ryoumei had mentioned. The weeks in hospital. He flicked a glance up at Haruki. The attack had happened the previous winter. If Haruki’s form in the dojo was any indication, he had recovered completely. And yet…

Though there wasn’t much he could have done to stop it, Klaus had the sense that he ought to have arrived much sooner.

‘Any word from Shoda?’ Haruki asked, cutting into his thoughts.

‘Nothing,’ Aizawa confirmed. ‘Our spies haven’t heard anything from him for weeks. It’s like he’s dropped off the map.’

The leader of the _Hitobito_ , rumoured to be in hiding somewhere in their province. Klaus remembered a blurry photograph in a newspaper showing narrow eyes, arched eyebrows and high cheekbones. He wore his long hair up in the traditional samurai style but he wore boots over pants and a vest beneath his coat. They called him, disparagingly, the Western Samurai.

Haruki lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Klaus watched him. Some of his hair was brushed back but most of his fringe fell forwards into his eyes, catching the projector light in little gleams.

The same metallic shade reflected off Aizawa’s rectangular glasses.

'We have, however, gathered a bit more intel on the rebels' resources,' Aizawa went on. 'It appears that perhaps our initial suspicions on the west's involvement are correct.'  
  
'What's the new information?' Haruki asked, his voice slightly brittle.  
  
As Aizawa rattled off a sketchy list of sources, Klaus' brows knit together.  
  
'The west's involvement?' he echoed.  
  
'There's rumours that the west is funding the rebels,' Haruki explained a little tensely. 'In an effort to destabilise our armies.'  
  
Aizawa flicked Klaus a look over his glasses. Klaus caught similar looks from a few of the other officers around the table.  
  
'They're just rumours,' Haruki went on. He added pointedly to Aizawa, 'And I won't make any decisions based on unsubstantiated claims.'  
  
'Given our history with the west, sir, it's not out of the question for their nations to have placed some stake in -'  
  
'He's right, Commander,' Klaus interjected. 'My countrymen are funding the revolution. It's part of our grand master plan. In fact, Shoda and I go way back. He sends his regards.’

Aizawa and Hasebe scowled at him and the rest of the table, comprising a half-dozen officers, seemed to fidget in their seats. Haruki alone seemed to understand Klaus was having an incensed, indignant little joke, dangerous though it was.

Klaus had patiently withstood prejudice and hostility the last time he was there. He faced it now – when their nations broiled at the borders and where xenophobic sentiment might even have a hand in sparking a new war – with a strange mixture of boredom and exasperation. He couldn’t help the urge to steer completely into the skid.  
  
‘You’ve seen what Shoda's wearing these days, right? I loaned him that coat and those boots. I think they look better on me, personally.'  
  
For Klaus, the uneasy silence was worth it just to see Haruki fighting so hard to keep from smiling. Hasebe sighed in disgust.  
  
Aizawa pushed his glasses up his nose. He had silently withstood the foreigner's interruptions during the course of the briefing and thought it was time to ask.

‘Who exactly are you?’

‘Grand Chamberlain, this is Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt,’ Haruki answered.

‘I see,’ said Aizawa crisply. ‘The famous former knight.’

Klaus heard the subtle emphasis on the word ‘former’. He wondered what the man knew about him.

‘In the flesh,’ he said grimly.

Aizawa bristled slightly at the irreverent glint in the foreigner’s gaze and turned to Haruki.

‘May I ask why he’s here exactly, Commander? Surely with all the rumours about the west sending spies into our military facilities, it would appear to headquarters as though –’

‘Headquarters saw no issue with my appointing a Eurotean as my bodyguard. I can’t imagine they’d have a problem with an experienced soldier who once fought for our country being part of my counsel.’

‘If I may, sir, Eurote is our ally. The west, on the other hand –’

‘There’s no war outside of our own borders, Grand Chamberlain. It’s a little early to speak in terms of allies and foes.’

The thinness of the argument and the reality of the cold war were overshadowed by the quiet strength of Haruki’s tone; one that Klaus didn’t think the kid was capable of. He had spoken in such a way that it would appear almost petty, by comparison, for anyone to counter him.

Aizawa, however, tried.

‘But, sir –’

‘The captain is here as a personal favour to me,’ Haruki said, his tone hinting that the discussion was over. ‘What’s next?’

* * *

After the briefing, Klaus sat on the squat brick railing of the entrance steps, lighting a cigarette one-handed. A few paces away stood Kolya, who had remained exactly where Haruki had left him, his hands behind his back, staring vigilantly at nothing. His pose reminded Klaus of the long-hatted royal guards at the palace in Braxton. He was overcome with the urge to blow smoke into his ear or trip him up.

They, and Kaiser, were left at the entrance of the building after the briefing, after Aizawa materialised beyond Haruki’s shoulder and asked for a quick word. Haruki stepped back inside, indicating with only a brief wave that Kolya didn’t have to follow.

Klaus took a drag and considered the silent Eurotean.

_Kolya’s been through a lot._

Whatever it was, it was hidden beneath his Sphinx-like gaze.

It was a bright, cold day without much wind. Another marching drill thundered by, headed by a barrel-chested sergeant Klaus was sure had been doing the same thing nine years ago.

He was halfway through his cigarette, barely even noticing the silence, before he wondered whether he should take the opportunity to get to know Haruki’s shadow. Or at least try to.

‘They’re tough on outsiders around here,’ he said flippantly. ‘Some things never change. Bet you’ve gotten the third degree as much as I have.’

Silence. Kolya stared straight ahead.

‘That bad, huh?’ Klaus persisted. ‘Well, don’t beat yourself up about it. You’ll win them over with that smile of yours.’

Still no response. Klaus exhaled a puff of smoke and leaned forwards thoughtfully as though engrossed in conversation.

‘Well, since you asked, the best way to win them over is to blow up a farmhouse in No Man’s Land. They’ll be falling over themselves to thank you.’

Haruki emerged from the doorway beside Kolya in time to hear the end of their one-sided conversation. He looked at Klaus, his eyes twinkling, and Klaus remembered with a start that Haruki had been there.

‘You’d know all about that mission, wouldn’t you, kid?’

They descended the steps with Kolya and Kaiser only a step behind Haruki. Klaus walked beside him languidly.

‘The whole compound does,’ Haruki replied with a smile. ‘Everyone either remembers or they’ve been told about it. What happened after the second war. Especially what happened in No Man’s Land.’

Klaus remembered the respect from the soldiers at the front gate and even the cadets in the auditorium. It was the kind of respect that would take some getting used to.

‘Your bodyguard’s a lot of fun,’ Klaus said. ‘He’s got a real mouth on him, though. I could barely get a word in edgewise.’

Haruki chuckled and threw a warm look over his shoulder at Kolya.

‘Speaking of people who don’t stop talking,’ Klaus went on. ‘Where’d Aizawa come from?’

Haruki’s smile went away. ‘He was appointed by the capital. I… didn’t get a say.’

‘So he’s Tachibana’s little spy, is he?’ Klaus imputed.

‘The thought has crossed my mind,’ said Haruki. ‘Though I’d like to think not.’

Klaus looked at him and thought about what Ryoumei said. A heart of gold, no matter how much he had tried to beat it out of him over the years. Klaus smiled at the floor contemplatively.

‘There’s something wrong with the world when Hasebe looks like a friendly face by comparison.’

Haruki told him that headquarters had offered Hasebe the role of commander but he turned it down, claiming it ought to be held by someone of the same standing as Taki-sama.

‘He was fairly… vocal about the fact that headquarters vetted me,’ Haruki said. Klaus could imagine it only too well. ‘But then after our first incident with the rebels, he seemed to have changed his mind. I’m not sure why, but I’m grateful. His guidance has been invaluable.’

Klaus suspected Hasebe saw in Haruki what everyone else saw. Glimmers of the old commander.

'What's on the agenda for the rest of the day?'  
  
'I'm going into Hokane to join a patrol for a report on any _Hitobito_ movement and for a ground's eye view.' Another slight hesitation. 'I'd be grateful if you -'  
  
'You don't have to ask nicely, kid,' Klaus said. ‘You can order me around.’

Not quite the old commander yet, he thought fondly when he caught another uncertain smile.

* * *

Kolya had been Haruki’s shadow for long enough that he was able to tell when his master was preoccupied, even when he was engrossed in conversation.

He and Haruki made their way to the telegram room without Klaus, who had gone ahead to the west gate where the jeeps awaited. Their footfalls echoed across the square. Soldiers returning to their barracks from the mess hall sprang upright to salute the young commander. Kolya followed proudly in his stead.  
  
'Sir,' he began.  
  
Haruki turned his head. Kolya spoke so rarely that, whenever he did, it always managed to startle him how low and rumbling his voice was.

‘Yes?’

'What did Aizawa say?'  
  
Uncanny as always, Haruki thought. He turned back.  
  
'He – he had someone look into Klaus' file during the briefing. They even managed to bring up his movements over the past year.'  
  
'He's been tailed?'  
  
'Not exactly. They just found records from a few foreign airfields where his plane landed.' Haruki paused. 'Aizawa thinks the west recruited him again. After Taki-sama died. He thinks they sent him on a scouting mission of some kind.'  
  
Silence.  
  
'Do you think he's -?'  
  
'No,' Haruki answered without skipping a beat. 'I'm just frustrated we have to deal with the same suspicions all over again. After everything he did for us in the last war.'

Haruki's emotions turned slightly sour again when he thought of his clipped, strained conversation with the Grand Chamberlain.

'Forgive me, sir,' Aizawa had said with a pointed glance over his glasses. 'But from what I've gathered in just a short time, it's clear that Wolfstadt's loyalty was to Taki-sama above all else. And in light of the former commander's death, it would be reckless to assume Wolfstadt continues to harbour any lingering sense of duty to the east. In fact, it would surely make more sense for the west would try to recruit him, given his intimate knowledge of our -'  
  
'He's not what you think he is,' Haruki said firmly. 'And that's the last I'll hear of it, Grand Chamberlain.'  
  
After Haruki sent the message ahead to the patrol in Hokane to let them know he and his officers would be joining them, he and Kolya made their way to the jeeps.  
  
He couldn’t be more sure of the fact that Klaus was here of his own volition. But Aizawa's cold, efficious words had landed in a different way.  
  
_It's clear that Wolfstadt's loyalty was to Taki-sama above all else._  
  
And always will be, Haruki reminded himself.

Kolya kept an eye on the commander and wondered what else was on his mind.

* * *

In Hokane, Klaus listened to the lieutenants briefing their commander as they walked through the streets. There were sidewalks and parts of buildings that had been reduced to rubble. A bridge that had collapsed and was slowly, painfully, being rebuilt.

And, on occasion, mistrustful and almost fearful stares that followed in their wake.

Haruki didn’t speak of the things he had hinted at in the letter. Things he hadn't foreseen. The conflict between duty and honour; the fight against his own people.

Even though he didn’t talk about it, Klaus had gathered it in pieces. How the division had been forced to retaliate against rebel strikes, even if it meant civilians got caught in the cross-fire. He tried to imagine the feeling of turning his gun on those he had sworn to protect. Klaus watched the commander out of the corner of his eye. It seemed a typical enough fate for the commander of the Fifteenth to have had so much fall on his shoulders at such a young age.  
  
They went from Hokane to the division's training ground.  
  
During the last war, they had been launched headfirst into combat against a determined and assertive west. Here, there were long periods of silence between strikes from the _Hitobito_. Klaus saw for the first proper time the vast, open areas a few minutes' drive from the compound where the division conducted drills.  
  
He recognised it as a once thickly populated area of trees and wilderness. He even remembered the day he and Taki had taken off into the trees in pursuit of the wave of black ants that had been sent on Hans Regenwalde's tail. He remembered the tanks blowing trees apart to make way. The groaning, falling trunks and sad, violent rustling of the leaves.  
  
Now there wasn't a tree in sight.  
  
Haruki seemed to read his mind as they climbed out of their jeep.  
  
'I was going to have it all replanted,' he said. 'There were still a lot of trees left after the second war. But then the order came down for new training grounds. And they uprooted what was left.'  
  
A hint of regret in his voice. Like he was apologising to no one in particular.  
  
'Well, the solution's clear enough then,' Klaus remarked. 'Stop the revolution in its tracks, defeat the west again when the next war breaks out, somehow get rid of the guy sitting on the throne and find Meiji wherever he's hiding. Then you can go back to replanting.'  
  
Haruki gave a surprised chuckle. Klaus, in turn, was surprised he didn’t glance about to see if anyone, aside from Kolya, had heard Klaus' risky little jest about the emperor. He realised a part of him must have gotten used to Taki’s skittishness.  
  
Taki.

He stared out at the empty landscape. Just on the other side of the dry expanse of grass and dirt was a line of trees and then mountains, as always, beyond that.  
  
_'Klaus?'_  
  
Taki's voice. Reverberating in the air. It was loud and strong so it wasn't _his_ Taki, the one he spoke to sometimes when he was alone. It was a memory that the land had claimed.  
  
'I'm here,' Klaus had responded through the radio that day, nine years ago.  
  
'I –'  
  
Klaus had heard the hesitation in his master's voice and smirked. Above them in the clear sky were fighter jets, tailing their retreat, buzzing like wasps. And the special ops team, the black ants, still skulked about in the trees.  
  
'Just calling to say hello?' Klaus said slyly.  
  
'Watch for the special ops soldiers,' Taki said, and Klaus could almost hear the flush in his cheeks. 'Don't lose your focus on the ground.'  
  
'You're on the ground. No chance of my losing focus.'  
  
_You're on the ground._  
  
Klaus stared at the now-empty landscape. A No Man's Land in miniature. A small expanse of land which still held on to Taki's voice.  
  
Haruki wondered whether he ought to interrupt the captain's reverie. There was a faraway look in his eye that Haruki recognised and made him feel like he had left the world behind.  
  
Then Klaus turned to him. His coat collar flapped up against his cheek.  
  
'Ready?'  
  
He had asked the same question in the same tone a year ago on the wheat fields when he had shown Haruki how to hand-pick. Haruki turned and gave his sergeant the order. Now, instead of stalks and woven baskets -  
  
In a matter of minutes, the ground shook beneath their feet. Tanks rose into view from beyond the incline like they emerged from the soil itself, rows and rows of them, canons at the ready, glinting in the cold sunlight, with Murakumo at the helm.

* * *

_MEANWHILE, IN THE IMPERIAL PALACE_

The door to the imperial office was swung open by an attendant and General Nakamori entered alone. Tachibana promptly dismissed all of his attendants.

Nakamori sat before the broad desk and his jowls quivered from the impact. He stared at the emperor’s face, even stiffer than usual, perhaps owing to the heavy headdress, and wondered how it was that he had barely aged in the eleven years since they had started colluding.

Emperor Tachibana stared at Nakamori and wondered the complete opposite.

‘I came as soon as I got your message,’ Nakamori said. When they were alone, they promptly did away with all propriety.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ the emperor replied. ‘But we have word that Wolfstadt is back at the Fifteenth Armoured Division.’

Nakamori needed a second.

‘Wolfstadt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘That remains unclear. Presumably he feels some kind of allegiance to the division or the new commander, Yamamoto.’

‘So he’s not there because his old bosses sent him? His uncle or his brother?’

‘Not as far as we can tell.’

Silence.

They both thought about how Klaus had infiltrated their weapons facility and blown their secret and nearly cost Tachibana everything. They thought of his hand in saving Meiji from the rebel attack in Eurote. Not to mention his rescuing Taki Reizen from No Man’s Land all those years ago and halting both his and Mussolin’s plans in their tracks.

‘Like I said, it’s probably nothing,’ Tachibana said testily. ‘But given how much of a thorn he’s been in our side, I thought it was worth looking into.’

‘Yamamoto has already defied headquarters in the middle of a skirmish with the rebels,’ Nakamori confirmed. ‘The whole division might need to be watched a little closer.’

‘See that it is.’

* * *

_TWO WEEKS LATER_

Klaus would sometimes wake up back in the cottage. He would roll over and pull Taki against his chest. They were both still wearing clothes after having fallen asleep in exhaustion the previous night. Their first harvest had taken a toll. It had been only a few months since they left the east for good. Klaus had only just turned twenty-seven, leaving the most momentous year of his life behind.

He ran his hands over Taki's slender waist, past his hips, down the side of his thigh. The smell of roses and rain. Taki's hair on the pillow. The hint of dark eyes beyond the curve of his cheek.

The move was subtle. Klaus had to pay attention to notice. Taki folded backwards into his hold just slightly. And there were gentle hands on his arms.  
  
Each time Klaus awoke in the cottage and found he was, in fact, awake in his shed in the compound, there was a sense that he had slipped too far and too quickly into the future. But somehow, though it felt like a new battle each time, he would rise from bed. He would get dressed and pick up the brass handlebar, which seemed to get lighter every day.  
  
His head was clearer. His body firmer. His arm had fully healed and he felt that primed, riled up energy in the muscles of his arms and chest and legs, like it was teeming with a familiar, silent strength.

And now, a handful of weeks on, the division had already improved a great deal. Enough for Aizawa to reluctantly make a note on his clipboard about the enhanced mobility and efficiency of the front line of tanks.  
  
Haruki impressed on Aizawa and his men that it all owed to Klaus.  
  
Klaus, who had recognised early on that the _Hitobito's_ main offensive was composed of manoeuvre strategy; trying to use shock and disruption to derail the military’s cohesiveness. He knew because it was a strategy he had always favoured, something that had riled up the Western Alliance on the front lines. He put himself in the rebel's shoes. And he lined up his own attack.  
  
Half the platoon backed him up in jeeps and even bikes. They roared from the treeline to meet the tanks head on.  
  
And from behind the canon of Murakumo, Haruki mounted a solid defence against Klaus' attack.

It was the kind of large-scale, head-to-head sparring that Klaus had sometimes fantasised about doing during the last war; the kind that pitted his strategy, his brawn and his own men against those of his master.

And after his initial setbacks, Haruki responded wonderfully.

Offence and defence maintained radio communication so the tank operators could call out their hypothetical launches. Jeeps and infantry stopped where they were once they were taken out. Klaus was often one of the last to be hit.  
  
At first he and his men would weaved and cut around the front line, reduce several tanks to cinders and come out cleanly on the other side. And Haruki would slump in a hypothetically destroyed Murakumo.  
  
But by the second and third drill he had adapted to Klaus' moves. And eventually Klaus himself would be gunned or blown apart by the defense.  
  
Whenever Klaus' version of the _Hitobito no Shori_ came up short, it warmed his heart to see Haruki and his men climb out of the tank beaming, the young commander’s praises of the soldiers both lines of tanks and his men's loud, bright adulation of their Wolfpup. Where Taki inspired a kind of divine reverence, the men’s love for Haruki was open and buoyant. Hope flared brightly on those days.  
  
And it seeped into Klaus in short bursts at a time.

* * *

Another cold morning dawned and Haruki awoke earlier than Kolya, which was a rarity. He showered and dressed and sorted through his mail which contained a note from Ambassador Feulner that would put a halt on their morning’s plans. With an hour or so to spare, Haruki then walked briskly from his room to the shed, wondering if perhaps the captain was awake. Kaiser paused only to remark his territory along some trees that were going stale and his coat rippled with each bound as he sped up to his master.

Haruki gave him a fond smile and a pat. Transient though it undoubtedly was, Haruki couldn’t help being happy. It had only been a few days since their last successful drill. All was quiet from the _Hitobito_ ; it had been over a month since any of the divisions had heard from them. He remembered how Klaus had called him a lucky charm back at the cottage. He wondered if the reverse was also true.

And he remembered Klaus’ words of praise from a few days ago. They were uttered brashly, as was his way. But they left an imprint, as did the slow, wide smile Haruki glimpsed from behind the shoulders of his men after their successful drill. The implausibly tall figure astride the bike, tan coat flapping. There had always been something about Klaus that seemed on the verge of being unreal.

He was about to draw up to the door when Kaiser sniffed the air and scampered around the side of the shed near where the bike was. Curious, Haruki followed.

He was just in time to see Klaus – wearing only a cotton shirt and trousers that seemed far too thin for the cold – twirling a large heavy brass object in sweeping arcs on either side of his body, sweat gleaming on his face and arms. He lunged powerfully into the air several times before he caught sight of Haruki.

He swung the makeshift shinai across his shoulders. Haruki recognised it as the bike’s old handlebars.

‘Hey, kid,' Klaus puffed. He took a few steps closer, chest rising and falling heavily. He ran the back of his hand beneath a sopping fringe as he panted.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to… interrupt,’ Haruki said. His pulse betrayed him.

‘I was just about done. What’s going on?’

Klaus’ shirt cleaved to him in dark patches of sweat along the hard muscles of his chest and stomach. His hair glistened in the thin beams of sunlight that fell through the canopy of the trees surrounding the shed.

Haruki struggled not to stare.

‘I – I just wanted to let you know I’m cancelling this morning’s briefing and patrol. I’m heading into the capital with Kolya for a few hours. We’ll be back by midday.’

‘Sure.’ Klaus flexed out his right arm, which he had pushed a little too hard that day, and fixed Haruki with a small grin. ‘Why the VIP treatment? You could have sent someone to let me know.’

Haruki tried to gather his thoughts.

‘I also – I haven’t really had a chance to thank you properly. For your help with everything over the past few weeks.’

‘What are you talking about? We’ve done nothing but drills.’

‘But it’s really helped morale among the men. I can see it. I think it’s thanks to you.’

Klaus, in a strange moment, realised he was somewhat unused to extended praise.

‘Happy to know I’m pulling my weight, Commander.’

Haruki, though sure he had planned to say more on the subject, found that words were suddenly not forthcoming. He glanced at the handlebars stretching across Klaus’ heavy shoulders.  
  
'I can bring you a real shinai. If you... want one.'  
  
'Nah, I've gotten attached to this thing.' Klaus tossed it in the air where it spun once in an elegant arc before landing firmly in his hand again. 'It's helped me get back in shape faster than I thought. Not bad, right?'  
  
'No,' Haruki said, with only a small falter that Klaus nevertheless managed to notice.  
  
'You okay, kid?' Klaus asked, wondering why the commander seemed a little put out.  
  
'Yeah – I just… aren't you cold?' Haruki managed.

‘Cold keeps me on my feet. I sparred with Taki once in weather like this wearing even less.’

‘I remember,’ Haruki said without thinking.

Klaus raised his eyebrows. ‘You do?’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki said, kicking himself a little. ‘A few of us spied Taki-sama fighting from over the wall. And… and then you came up and –’

‘Taki royally kicked my ass.’

A small laugh. ‘You were… really good, though.’

‘Not good enough to beat him. I never did.’

A short silence fell, one that Klaus was a little surprised to discover wasn’t overly painful.

‘Anyway, you won’t catch me like this for long. Winter’ll come early this year, I can feel it.’

After another silence where Haruki couldn't think of anything to say, he decided it was high time he excused himself.

'I – uh – I'll leave you to it.'

'See you in a few hours, Commander.'

Kaiser gambolled happily around Haruki's legs and Klaus watched them until they disappeared from view.

* * *

They were short bursts of happiness, like little bubbles of feeling captured from a happier time. Though they didn’t last long, and though there was still a constant, dull ache in Klaus’ chest, there was now something else that pulled him away before he sank. Something stronger, even, than whatever had moved him into the cockpit and carried the _Sagi_ all over the world. It was a tiny light, however feeble and intermittent, that shone on a moonless, starless night, right at the edge of where the waves ended.

But that morning when Haruki left the compound to meet with Ambassador Feulner, a small ink-stain – a familiar texture and shape – began to spread again.

Klaus walked along the compound’s perimeter that morning and smiled at the sight of Kaiser waiting by the front gates, more heedful than the soldiers posted there. Cadets could be seen clearing fallen leaves off the paths leading through the square and in courtyards. Klaus always made sure to give them a meaningful nod when they saluted him. There was no telling where they would be in nine years. 

That was when he caught sight of Suguri, who was watching him from the entrance to his office. The expression on his face was one Klaus couldn’t escape or ignore. He had managed to avoid speaking to him alone for two weeks. He was like a spectre from the past that would pull him back. Just when he was beginning to scramble about for a hold on the real world again.  
  
But their eyes met. And Klaus sighed internally, feeling like he couldn't evade him any longer.  
  
'Your arm seems to have healed,' Suguri observed somewhat coolly, by way of greeting.

‘Good as new.'  
  
'You always seem to recover from injuries surprisingly fast.’  
  
Klaus picked up on his tone. He thought of the untouched vials in the suitcase.  
  
'You won’t believe me, but I'm not on anything, doc.'

The seconds lengthened until Klaus was sure Suguri was dragging it out on purpose just to make him tense. He still found it hard to look Suguri in the eye.

Whatever truce they had found at the end of the last war had been shattered in the wake of Taki’s death. Suguri was the only one who knew. That it had all been Klaus’ fault.

‘So you’re here to stay, are you?’ Suguri said finally.

Klaus hesitated. ‘Looks that way.’

There was a pause.

‘Not quite like last time, though,’ he added, trying to mask his little knot of emotions with a cavalier tone. ‘No piers or vows. So you’ll probably be rid of me a lot sooner.’

Despite Suguri’s expressionless face, Klaus thought he could hear his unspoken thought that he would very much like to believe it.

After another lengthy silence, Klaus wondered whether he ought to simply excuse himself. Something was telling him to leave before Suguri spoke again. It was the same sense of foreboding he had felt in his dream right before Enrico had started saying things that gently tore into his skin.

'You shouldn't be here,' said Suguri, almost on cue.  
  
Klaus stared.  
  
'What?'  
  
Suguri’s wooden expression was beginning to shift, like something was at work deep beneath the surface.

'You… your influence is the last thing Haruki needs. He’s proven himself a capable leader, but he’s… young. And impulsive. He’s already made decisions against orders in the middle of combat.’

Klaus felt a flicker of defiance.

‘He only did that because headquarters told him to turn his guns on his own people.’

‘We’re in the middle of a civil war, Captain,’ Suguri returned. ‘It’s not as black and white as you think. Now more than ever, our survival depends on how much loyalty we show to the capital. And your voice is one that Haruki doesn’t need in his head. Your recklessness. How you tear things down just for your own… your own...'

Suguri’s feelings tumbled from him in a way not even he expected. All he remembered in his mind’s eye was the way that Taki had called to him blearily from a bed in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. His eyes foggy and unfocused, his speech slurred. Suguri could tell that Taki didn’t even know for sure whether or not Suguri was there. His own hands had trembled and tears spilled at the memory of the child he had looked after. The child with the deep, dark blue eyes. The child who had grown to be a god in the form of a man to an entire nation, but had always remained like a son to him.

And here, before him, was the reason why Taki had been taken.

Klaus’ mouth was dry. It was suddenly like no time had passed since the day Suguri held a gun to his forehead.  
  
'You shouldn't be here,’ said Suguri, his voice hoarse and low. ‘Not this time or last time.'  
  
_You're not cursed, Klaus. You are the curse._  
  
Klaus held his gaze for as long as he could.  
  
The light he thought he had glimpsed beyond the waves blinked out in an instant. He was back in his shed and there was Taki's still face in the blue light of dawn. The talons sank back in like they had been waiting for the smallest sign of weakness. He opened the black satchel with hands that shook very slightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should mention that the hero-turned-mentor Victor/Yuuri dynamic going on between Klaus and Haruki happened in my head long before YOI haha, I'm glad I have my time-stamped prologue as proof. Also, I guess Yuuri never had to deal with a grief-stricken, morphine-addicted Victor. (Season 2 perhaps? Lol!)


	49. Old Habits

Snow covered the compound in no time, just as Klaus had predicted. Haruki had always hated winter where he grew up, when his large, cold house was made even more oppressive. He would feel more alone than ever, despite the constant, gentle presence of his oldest servant, Ukiyo. The season would be spent impatiently waiting for the snow to thaw so he would be sent back to boarding school or the compound. The first winter he had spent away from home was the one during which the last war had raged. The winter he met Klaus.

Since that year, winter carried more for him than memories of a cold house and empty grounds and a father whose gaze was sometimes colder and emptier. The cold now reminded him of the day he had ridden on the back of Klaus’ bike. Winter wind reminded him of the day he and Moriya, Azusa and Date had loaded their jeep with weapons and taken off to rescue their commander from Mussolin's clutches. And the first snowfall brought him back to a kiss he had spied in No Man’s Land where the flurry of snow was stopped by a small grove of trees.

That winter, aside from a few minor skirmishes in other provinces, there had still been no attacks from the _Hitobito_ and no orders for raids from headquarters. The division still underwent regular drills, improving and refining the methods Klaus had introduced to them.

Klaus himself, however, seemed to have retreated behind a wall.  
  
Haruki noticed it first a few weeks ago when he and Kolya returned from the ambassador’s house in the capital and Klaus didn’t turn up for that afternoon’s briefing. The next morning, he seemed out of sorts. His eyes didn't have their usual piercing gaze.

‘I’m fine, kid,’ he assured Haruki when he asked, with a weathered smile and hands in his pockets. ‘You’ve got bigger things to worry about.’

Haruki then began to notice every now and then when Klaus turned up to briefings with bloodshot eyes. His gaze was subdued rather than unfocused. Haruki wondered whether it was something other than alcohol.  
  
_He'll fall back on old habits. He won't be himself._  
  
Klaus von Wolfstadt occupied a strange place in Haruki's mind. He was somewhere above rank. Above propriety.

Haruki knew he technically had the right to ask him about it. Perhaps even the right to tell him not to. There was something implicit in his promise to Taki that he would pull Klaus out of anything self-destructive.  
  
But where Klaus was, Haruki couldn't reach.

Klaus was the hand that helped him up from the floor when the other cadets knocked him to the ground. He was the warm, broad back on the bike that he held onto amidst the deafening roar of an air raid. The figure that loomed up over him to take down enemy soldiers in the middle of combat, his face and movements as unruffled as though he was simply rising from bed. Klaus was a guilty thought before sleep and an outline of tan and gold and a bright, careless laugh in the corner of his mind. Klaus was elsewhere. He had always been elsewhere.  
  
And so, in addition to going through his duties at the division, Haruki kept Klaus in the corner of his eye, wishing he could do more for both.

* * *

Klaus was trapped, yet again, by a vow. A new duty. One that didn’t bind him as strongly but one he nevertheless couldn’t shirk. He had told Haruki he was his for as long the young commander needed him. It was a vow that had even come close to reviving him for a few brief weeks.

And then reality had come knocking in the form of Suguri. The awful truth in what he had said. The awful secret. The words flapped around in his mind from morning until night. And he knew Haruki had noticed a change over the past few weeks.

_You killed your rose. Just like you’ll kill your pup._

He looked at Haruki with a twinge of guilt, like the commander didn't know he had invited a time bomb into their midst. Like at any moment, the curse would burst forth from Klaus and Haruki would be swallowed up. Another life Klaus would take.

But, unable to leave, he stayed.

In an effort to derail Haruki’s concerns about him, he tried to do right by him. He tried as much as he could to throw himself into each new challenge. He and Haruki had continued training and the division steadily improved their anti-guerrilla strategy.

One noteworthy drill saw Klaus face to face with Murakumo after a half-hour's engagement, with most of the other tank, infantry and jeeps either destroyed or engaged elsewhere. All of Klaus' anti-tank missiles had been hypothetically launched. He had only his gun and grenades left. Klaus gunned the bike, one foot on the ground, goggles up as he considered his next move. Haruki imagined it without having to see it.  
  
And suddenly Klaus leaned forwards, kicked his bike into gear and roared towards Murakumo head-on.  
  
'What's he doing?' Azusa said in confusion.  
  
'I'm... not sure,' said Haruki.  
  
Klaus wheeled into the centre of their tank formation and radioed that he had released the last of his grenades and destroyed the ground beneath the tanks to throw them off kilter, even though the impact wouldn't destroy the tanks themselves.  
  
'But you couldn't have outrun the blast in time,' said Haruki, still confused.  
  
'Kamikaze style,' Klaus replied. 'You have to be prepared for anything from these guys.’

Haruki gave an exasperated sigh. It was true. And after Klaus' sacrifice, all remaining tanks were weakened and vulnerable. They had lost.

They reviewed the day's strategy back at the office.  
  
‘The _Hitobito_ is far less organised than you,’ Klaus said, thinking back to his brief brush with rebels back in Eurote. ‘They have a fraction of your resources. They know they're outmatched. So they'll make up for it with desperation. No holds barred. It'll be their strength and their weakness. Try to use that to your advantage.’

Haruki nodded slowly and took in the tank formations before him. ‘Maybe in that situation, the second line of tanks could –’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Klaus interrupted. ‘Save it for tomorrow’s drill. See if you can surprise me.’

Haruki glanced up with a hopeful smile.

‘Right,’ he said. Then he remembered. ‘There's no drill tomorrow. I’ve been called to the capital again. I've scheduled it for the day after.’

Something shifted on Klaus’ face.

‘Should I come with you?’ he asked.

‘There’s no need. General Nakamori wants a meeting with just the division commanders. Hasebe’s not even coming.’

Klaus fell silent.

It was when Haruki was gone – either to afternoon-long meetings in other divisions or days-long conferences in the capital with Ambassador Feulner or General Nakamori – that restlessness and self-loathing came to Klaus like an itch. The last time it had happened, he had lost hours to an entire vial of morphine in his shed and woken up just in time to go to a briefing, where he could tell that Haruki had noticed it for the first time.

Something about the devil and idle hands, he thought numbly, suddenly dreading the few hours he had to himself.

‘You’re taking Mr Talkative though, I hope?’ Klaus said finally, flicking a glance at Kolya who had barely moved.

‘I am,’ Haruki said with another small grin.

‘Good,’ Klaus said. ‘Don’t drop your guard even in the capital, okay?’

Haruki wondered if there was something off in Klaus’ expression. He nodded, hoping he was imagining it.

* * *

Haruki and Kolya were held back in the capital for a day longer than planned. When they returned to the compound two days later, that morning's briefing went by without Klaus. And he wasn’t waiting by the jeep to head out for the training grounds.

Haruki gazed across the square, hoping for a tall form in a tan coat to materialise. When the minutes ticked away, even Kolya wondered if he ought to say something. The men gathered and milled about the tanks, waiting.

A dark feeling welled up in Haruki’s gut. He quietly told one of his sergeants that the day’s drill had been called off. As the sergeant delivered the order, Haruki went back across the square in the direction of the officers’ courtyard.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Haruki told Kolya over his shoulder. Kolya reluctantly remained on the edge of the square.

Haruki didn’t know what to expect or what to say or whether he would say something that would make everything worse. But he had to know for sure whether Klaus’ recent distractions and distance spoke of his desire to leave. As hollow and painful as the thought was, and despite his promise to Taki, Haruki never once wanted Klaus to feel as though he owed him anything.

 _I understand,_ Haruki practiced in his head in response to what Klaus would say. _Thank you for everything you’ve done for us, Klaus. It means a lot that you – I hope that you know it meant a lot that you –_

He knew the words wouldn’t come quite so swiftly. They never did where Klaus was concerned.

There were still a few hours to go before midday, and the sun hadn’t yet come out with enough strength to thaw the snowfall from the previous night. Haruki pulled his coat around himself a little tighter. He cast a guilty glance at the side of the shed near where the bike was parked, knowing he wouldn’t be seeing Klaus there with his brass handlebar but hoping for it anyway – hoping for a sign that he might soon spring back to his normal self.

To his surprise, he did see Klaus there. The captain was sitting in the snow against the side of the shed, one knee in the air, his head tilted back.

Haruki's heart fell.

‘Klaus?’

As Haruki drew closer, he noticed a few more things. Though he couldn’t be sure, Klaus seemed to be wearing his uniform from the previous day. His eyes were vacant and bloodshot.

Klaus glanced up at the sound of footsteps. He seemed to have trouble focusing.

‘You’re back,’ he said, his speech slurred. He feebly reached up to Kaiser who sniffed his face in concern.

‘What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.’

‘Cold keeps me on my feet,’ Klaus quipped, gesturing unsteadily and ironically at his pose.

Haruki didn’t smile.

With the exception of how he had looked on a platform in the square when Taki stripped him of his knighthood, at no other point in Haruki’s life had he seen the captain look so diminished. It hurt him somewhere he didn’t want to think about.

He had kept an eye out for it and here it was before him, plain as day. Taki’s loss. Even a year and a half on, it was so indelibly part of Klaus’ being that Haruki realised with a hollow pang that Klaus would never be rid of it.

‘You should… go back inside,’ Haruki tried, seeing that Klaus’ hands were bare. He was feeling the chill even through his gloves.

‘’M fine,’ Klaus murmured, blinking slowly, staring at nothing.

‘Klaus –’

‘I’m fine.’

And so Haruki stood there before Klaus, facing the same dilemma that Claudia had faced over a year ago. He felt a tickle in his hair and glanced up. Snow had begun falling tentatively. Like a gentle nudge. He looked back down and squared his shoulders.

‘Come on,’ he said, his voice hardening. He crouched and took Klaus’ arm. ‘We’re going inside. Can you stand?’

He recognised the words as the first ones that Klaus had ever said to him.

Klaus pulled his arm away. It was a jerking, barely conscious movement but it was enough for Haruki to know he didn’t stand a chance of getting Klaus to his feet by himself. He suddenly wished he’d brought Kolya.

‘Leave me alone, kid.’

It was said with a flicker of a warning. One that reminded Haruki that Klaus was somewhere he couldn’t reach.

But that morning, Haruki didn’t let it faze him. That morning, Klaus was simply a soldier – _his_ soldier – sitting alone in the snow, needing his help.

‘Klaus, get up.’

‘I said I’m –’

‘That’s an order, Klaus,’ Haruki said in the strong, clipped tone he reserved for when he was in Murakumo.

Klaus blinked and focused again, his gaze a fraction sharper. For a moment, it was as though something had been lit far within and glimmered at the surface.

There was a short, important silence.

‘It’s been a while since anyone said that to me,’ he said, his dry tongue fumbling over the words.

Golden irises that seemed wan and dull surrounded by bloodshot white. Haruki had never seen his face so close before.

After another long pause, Klaus sighed and tried to lift himself up. Haruki took his arm again and helped. Once upright, Klaus seemed relatively stable. Haruki let go of his arm but remained close by as they rounded the shed and stepped inside.

Haruki closed the door behind him and swept his eyes around the small space. He was surprised not to see any empty bottles. He saw that Klaus’ suitcase was open against the wall. His pillow had fallen off the bed and the blankets were bunched up near the footboard. Klaus lowered himself onto the bed with a small groan, his eyes already closed. He breathed hard through his nose with each exhale.

For a few seconds, Haruki stared at him, feeling helpless. And grateful that at least he was out of the cold. He moved to cover Klaus with the blanket before noticing his boots were still on. He glanced up at Klaus, who appeared to be more or less asleep with a hand on his chest. Haruki then peered uncertainly at the laces on Klaus’ shoes. After undoing the loops, he realised, in a moment of ridiculousness, that he was too self-conscious to remove them completely. So he picked up the blanket and covered Klaus’ body with it, boots and all. He then picked up the pillow from the ground. He was relieved when Klaus lifted his head with only a gentle touch. Somehow, helping Klaus lift his head to slip the pillow beneath it didn’t seem as invasive as taking off his boots.

That was when he caught sight of the black satchel in Klaus’ open suitcase.

Kneeling beside it, Haruki lifted it out and carefully inspected the vials of clear liquid within. There were only a few. Most were empty. And at the bottom of the satchel was a length of string and a syringe.

_Old habits._

It took Haruki a few seconds to process. Then he stood, went to Klaus and gently lifted his right arm out from under the blanket. He rolled the sleeve of Klaus’ coat back and did the same for the jacket underneath. His eyes travelled across the tanned skin of Klaus’ forearm to the crease in his elbow.

He took in the little series of puncture marks there in the same way Taki did once.

‘I let go,’ Klaus mumbled suddenly.

Haruki almost jumped.

‘What?’ he said quietly.

‘On the roof,’ Klaus said. He opened his eyes halfway and looked at Haruki as though he was seeing past him. ‘I slipped 'cause of the rain. Grabbed onto the edge. Could have pulled myself up. I knew I could’ve pulled myself up. But I let go. That’s why I broke my arm.’

It felt, to Klaus, like hours had passed since the pearly, near-blinding whiteness of the early morning outside had been replaced by the warm wooden colours of the shed. He tried to focus on the face above him but he couldn’t.

Haruki felt a wave of emotion that stopped just short of tears. He covered Klaus’ arm back up, pulled the blanket over it and then walked to the desk. He drew out the chair and sat down. Kaiser curled up by the foot of the bed.

* * *

Taki.

Everywhere he went. In his shed. In the square. In the bare cherry blossom tree in the courtyard. Even in Haruki, in his figure from afar and the shape of his hair and the way he commanded his troops.

Taki, everywhere and nowhere.

_If you want to be with him so much that your entire life, from here on out, will be about trying to find him, that’s not much of a life, is it?_

The girl in the bar in Braxton had given him his right to choose. His destiny was no longer in Taki's hands. It was in his own. A volatile place for it to be. Perhaps that was why he had let go of the roof.

He awoke a few hours later, feeling as though there was a medley of voices in his head that would take years to sort through. One of them had the answer, he was sure of it. But he was too tired to figure out which one.

He then realised he was in his bed beneath the blankets without any clear memory of how he had ended up there. He lifted himself up slowly and blinked.

And there was the division commander at his desk, sitting up a little straighter when he saw Klaus coming to.

‘Haruki...’

Clearly, then, he hadn’t imagined seeing Haruki’s face earlier that day. He was surprised to find, somewhere in the coil of self-loathing and indignity that Haruki had seen him like that, a small spark of relief that he was back.

‘How are you feeling?’ Haruki asked cautiously.

Klaus felt out the pounding between his temples. His limbs were still heavy. He could feel his veins carrying traces of morphine.

Still, at the centre of it all, was a pinprick of warmth that hadn't been there over the past two days of Haruki's absence.

‘Better,’ he said, remembering how he had replied in the same way to Claudia. But now, in the smallest possible way, he meant it. He glanced at the foot of the bed where Kaiser watched him, his head still on his paws, and thumped his tail once on the floor.

‘Do you need to go to the infirmary? I wasn’t sure whether to call Suguri or –’

‘No,’ Klaus said more forcefully than he intended. Suguri was the very last person he wanted to see. ‘You – it's good that you didn’t.’

Haruki brow furrowed slightly at his strange tone.

Klaus glanced at the open satchel in his suitcase and then back at Haruki’s face. The hair that fell into his eyes. The mouth that was set in a way Klaus hadn’t seen before. He tried to recall what had happened since Haruki found him outside. The memory came to him in patches that were frayed on the edges.

‘How long was I…?’

Haruki checked his watch. ‘A little over an hour.’

Klaus stared. ‘Have you been here the whole time?’

Haruki hesitated.

‘Kid,’ Klaus groaned, his head throbbing a little louder, ‘you can’t sit around babysitting me while there’s rebels and a war coming and –’

‘It was only an hour. I wasn’t sure whether to call Suguri but I – I didn’t want to leave you either.’

Klaus ran a hand through his hair heavily, massaging his scalp, trying to ease the throbbing.

This couldn’t go on. He had come because Haruki had called. He had stayed because he had hoped to be useful in some way. But now, after all this, and especially after everything Suguri had said…

There was a long stretch of silence where Haruki thought he could sense what was coming.

‘I didn’t come here to be a burden,’ Klaus said quietly. ‘If you have to worry about me on top of everything else, I think it’s time that I left.’

The shed mutely absorbed the words that had been several weeks in the making.

‘Klaus, it’s – it’s not like that,’ Haruki began. ‘But if…’ He struggled. He tried to remember what he had been practicing in his mind as he approached the shed. As he expected, the words didn’t come so smoothly. ‘But if _you_ want to go back home, I understand.’

Home.

Klaus clenched his eyelids shut for a brief moment. There was nothing waiting for him at the cottage but more of this. More of the same. If Haruki released him, he would go back there and be trapped in his vow to Claudia. But perhaps that was the life he deserved.

‘I told you I’d be here for as long as you needed me,’ he said resignedly. ‘So if you don’t –’

‘I do,’ Haruki said quickly. After a beat, he caught himself. ‘The division – you’ve done so much for us already. And I feel – I feel better… when you’re here.’ He heard the embarrassing callowness of the words but he kept going. ‘Like I know what I’m doing for the first time.’

‘You were doing fine before me.’

‘It wasn’t the same. I doubted myself with every step. But now, I don’t know… sometimes it feels like I can take on the _Hitobito_ and a nuclear war with the west and whatever else the gods have in store.’

He tried a small, dilettantish smile. Despite everything, Klaus again felt that small glow of warmth somewhere beneath the coils.

Though neither of them knew it, Haruki spoke of something that Klaus had also inspired in Taki each time they faced an enemy. It was something so irrationally strong that Taki had never once been able to tell him.

Suguri’s voice and Enrico’s and Haruki’s swilled about again in a faint echo of what he had heard when he slowly came back to consciousness. Claudia’s, in that moment, was the loudest.

_Take care of yourself, Klaus. And your pup, too._

He sighed.

Sorry, Suguri, he silently transmitted. The kid wants me here.

‘Alright,’ he said finally, looking up with a thin smile. There, finally, Haruki saw a certain sharpness that had been lacking for weeks. ‘Whatever you say, Commander.’

‘So… will you –?’

‘I’ll stay.’

_And I’ll do better._

Hope flared anew, completely disproportionate to the reality of their situation. The reality of how deeply Klaus was mired in his loss and his love, all of which Haruki now understood. But perhaps now, after seeing what he'd seen, Haruki might be better equipped to help him. And, most importantly, the division would continue to have Klaus.

He told him to take the day off. At the door, as Klaus was contemplating taking a shower, Haruki hovered for a moment.

_I let go. I knew I could’ve pulled myself up. But I let go._

‘Klaus,’ he said diffidently. ‘If you stay on in the division, even though you’re part of my counsel, you’d still be subject to military protocol like everyone else.’

Klaus glanced up. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you that, kid. You can boss me around every now and again.’

‘Then,’ Haruki said after a slight pause. ‘As your commander, I don’t want you doing… this… anymore.’

Klaus smiled almost tiredly and thought of how Taki had asked the same.

‘You got it.’

Haruki looked unconvinced.

‘You got it,’ Klaus repeated more firmly. ‘Sir,’ he added.

He was pleased to see Haruki smile at that.

The silenced and solitude that was left in Haruki’s wake, for the first time, didn’t dredge up any talons or ink-stains or voices.

Snow kept falling outside.

* * *

Since that day, Haruki became simultaneously more confident and more relaxed in Klaus’ presence. He would turn and smile when Klaus walked into the general meeting room, and more often than not, a subtle wink was all he needed to be reassured that Klaus was entirely himself.

When the urge to drink, or to open the black satchel, took over Klaus would remember the look on Haruki’s face as he sat by the desk, waiting for Klaus to wake up. It was one he hoped to never see again.

He also thought of their last drill. The crisp, clear sound of Haruki’s voice through radio speakers that had improved significantly since the previous war. He would think of Murakumo lurching forwards over the training field, somehow still more impressive than the newer counterparts which flanked him. He would think of the glint of Haruki’s gun in his holster as he climbed out and dropped deftly to the ground; the gun Klaus had given him almost a decade ago. He would think of all of that and it wouldn't leave room for much else.

In addition to tank drills, Klaus pitched in when it came to dismounted combat training. Though the men were well-disciplined, as he had expected, their training had been geared towards an organised enemy; fellow soldiers. He and Haruki organised new strategy for ground troops against the likes of the _Hitobito_.

And, like Taki before him, Haruki occasionally oversaw hand-to-hand combat training. His fusion of east and west made Haruki a lethal sparring partner – one that no one else in the compound had been able to best.

One afternoon, the square had been turned into an outdoor dojo to soak up the rare winter sun. An infantry unit had lined up and Haruki took each soldier in turn, leaving a trail behind him of either sore or defeated opponents, including Azusa and Date. Kolya watched from nearby.

Klaus had been content to watch too over the first few weeks while his arm healed. Now, with nothing holding him back, he stepped up with a shinai in hand and a grin that folded his scar into a small lightning bolt beneath his left eye.

‘This thing feels like air after you’ve practiced for a few weeks with a brass handlebar,’ he said lightly, in a way that nevertheless sounded like a threat.

Haruki felt adrenaline course through him in time with his heartbeat. Klaus stood before him in same pose he had seen him once over the wall, shinai in hand, smile irreverent.

He undid a few buttons of his shirt. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got, Wolfpup.’

At first, Haruki struggled to find his balance and his coordination. Klaus' size was overwhelming, his gaze fierce and his strikes merciless. Besides that, it was Klaus. Klaus, whom Haruki had watched doing it all against Taki all those years ago.

But once he had had a second to overcome the inertia of that simple fact, he felt his body slip automatically into gear; into the art that had been instilled in him since he was ten and then altered under the influence of something he had seen when he was fourteen.

Before long, men from other units began gathering to watch the fight.

Though Kolya had been good, it became clear to everyone that Haruki had never before faced an opponent like Klaus.

And Klaus, for one, felt as though he was fighting his own double. Haruki’s moves were bold and fierce, and his momentum was always geared forwards.

But that was also his failing.

It was Taki’s deftness, his ability to stay in control even in the heat of the moment, that had always bested Klaus in the end. It was something Haruki didn’t have.

And so, when the heat bore down on them even in the middle of winter and they were both panting and reaching the end of their tether, Klaus took advantage of his momentum. He sidestepped and knocked the shinai from Haruki’s hand.

Haruki faced the end of Klaus’ shinai, which was tucked beneath his chin, and tried to catch his breath. It had been a long time since anyone defeated him.

Disappointment flooded him alongside adrenaline. Here was fresh proof that he would always fall short of the former commander.

But he took comfort in Klaus’ crooked grin and took the fallen shinai when Klaus handed it to him. It occurred to him then that Klaus’ long golden scar suited him.

* * *

When they spoke together, often in Haruki’s office or when doing rounds of the compound, Klaus noticed that his duty to Haruki was very different to his duty as Taki’s knight. The role of protection had gone to Kolya and Klaus' unofficial place as part of Haruki's counsel made him feel strangely like Uemura. Beyond that, he was sometimes made to feel as though Haruki had placed greater stock in his wisdom than he was owed.

One evening, he and Haruki returned from the training ground, walking beneath a sky turned purple, when Haruki confessed his discomfort over some of his officers and soldiers calling him _sama._

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born into that kind of nobility. It almost makes me feel like a…’

 _Fraud,_ he thought but didn’t say, thinking it would sound far too dramatic.

Klaus watched him carefully. Kolya listened silently.

‘The men need something they can look up to,’ Klaus said gently, echoing someone else’s words, thinking of all that Taki had been for his men. ‘A pillar of strength. Even if you're not a god in human form, you give that to them. You give them hope.’

Haruki looked at him then, his lips parted slightly in surprise.

‘Let them see you for that,’ Klaus advised.

Kolya’s eyes flicked to Klaus and back and reflected, begrudgingly, on the startling truth behind his words. He then saw the way Haruki looked at Klaus and underwent a rush of emotions he didn’t quite understand.

* * *

It so happened that Klaus experienced something similar only seconds later, after he fell away from Haruki and Kolya and turned to go back to his shed. Haruki had agreed to join a patrol with the Fourteenth Armoured Division that afternoon and Klaus had steeled himself to spend several hours alone.

Before he walked out of sight, he turned his head on impulse. In the distance, Haruki and Kolya walked together, the swish of Kaiser’s tail following the billowing jade of Haruki’s coat. Haruki spoke over his shoulder to Kolya. Even from afar, Klaus could see that the commander's eyes were intent as he listened to Kolya's response. Klaus felt a surge of emotion when it occurred to him that he and Taki might have looked like that to others.

Not for the first time, he found himself wanting to know exactly what their relationship was. Neither had given much away over those few short months. Kolya for one had said only a handful of words in Klaus’ presence, each one weighed down heavily by his Eurotean accent.

He wondered.

And then thoughts of Haruki and Kolya and the rest of the day would filter away.

The end of the day, for Klaus, would more or less be the same. He would return from the day’s training or sorties or meetings and the smile he wore for Haruki would fall away slightly. The shed would take him in its silent, gentle hold and he would sit on the edge of the bed. Thanks to the commander, he no longer reached for the vials and syringe, but there wasn’t much the commander could do about the dull ache.

He remembered how he and Taki had spent hours on that bed, Taki gasping beneath him, eyes misted over, face flushed, moans escaping from deep inside him without his volition. He remembered feeling around for Taki's hand afterwards, both of them panting.

He could taste Taki on his tongue. He could smell his hair on sheets that had never even known him. He smoothed the blankets on the right side of the narrow bed.

‘He’s doing well,’ he said aloud. ‘I think he’ll do the division proud.’

He imagined Taki’s half-smile. And the ache receded just slightly.

There was a soft scratching at the door that pulled him from his thoughts. Curious, he got up and opened the door to see Kaiser standing alone on the front step. He gave Klaus a look that bordered on sheepishness before inviting himself in. He sprang onto the bed and curled up by the footboard, ears pressed back and eyes somewhat doleful.

Klaus felt a laugh bubble up.

‘The master left you behind too, did he?’

He ran a hand over the dog’s smooth black coat, which didn’t even provoke a twitch of his tail. Kaiser’s mind was elsewhere. Most likely at the front gates where Haruki had commanded him to wait. It was clear that Klaus' company was only being used for the sake of comfort.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Klaus said with a huff as he stretched out on the bed. ‘What does that Eurotean bastard have that you don’t?’

Something told him that Kaiser would be off the bed like a shot as soon as Haruki was back, even though the sound of jeeps didn't carry to that part of the compound.

As Klaus slowly nodded off, in the neighbouring province, on the border of the Fourteenth Armoured Division, the patrol that Haruki had joined was a few minutes away from colliding with a tripwire laid out by the _Hitobito no Shori_.


	50. Little Brass Airplanes

Haruki had noticed since he was young that the gods were fond of simultaneous strikes. After a lull of nearly three months, they faced their first skirmish with the _Hitobito_ that very afternoon during his patrol with the Fourteenth. And it was also on that same day that the cold war with the west finally took a turn.

The commander of the Fourteenth travelled with Haruki around the perimeter of the compound, stopping the jeep every now and then to brief Haruki on _Hitobito_ sightings and movement. There were two jeeps ahead of them and one more brought up the rear. They moved along a narrow stretch of road between tall, tree-laden ridges.

Out of nowhere, there was a sudden, immense crack to their left and above. Pale dirt exploded in the ridge above them and cascaded.

Haruki and the commander of the Fourteenth yelled orders in tandem. Their jeep floored the brakes and reversed, just shy of slamming into the tail end of the patrol. The jeep in front flew ahead.

They avoided the tree that came crashing and tumbling down the ridge by a hair’s breadth – it barrelled into the back of the jeep in front, sending it skidding off to the side for a few seconds before the driver managed to make it come to a halt.

Haruki’s heart raced. The last time a convoy of his had been attacked, he had been plunged without warning into the worst pain of his entire life. He barely registered Kolya pulling him out of the jeep and pressing him against the door. Kolya's eyes were intent on the ridge line above them, his gun drawn and pointed over the top of the jeep's roof.

The soldiers on either side of the fallen tree did the same.

‘Are you okay, sir?’ Kolya asked, sparing a glance down at the commander.

‘I’m fine,’ Haruki said, relieved to hear he sounded less rattled than he felt. He shook himself of the memory – the smell of gasoline, the searing burns – and edged out from between Kolya and the jeep.

‘Sir –’

‘I’m okay. Keep your eyes on the trees.’

Haruki drew out his own gun, Klaus’ gun, and inched around the jeep. His men were in the tail jeep and his priority was to make sure they were alright. The commander of the Fourteenth did the same for his men in the other vehicles.

A few cautious minutes later, after confirming that no one had been hurt, they established that they had set off a tripwire. An old one, by the looks of it, and amateurishly rigged. Meaning it had been left behind from the early days, before the rebels honed their skills and upgraded their resources.

Still, Haruki couldn’t help but take it as an omen of sorts.

He and his men headed back to the Fifteenth slowly, all eyes trying to see ahead, as though they might be able to spot another of the invisible wires, and breaking away to cast occasional glances at trees as though they might come tumbling onto them at any moment.

The radio in their jeep, however, pushed Haruki's mind from the war within their own borders to one that loomed beyond.

The latest news didn’t bode well. Tachibana’s government had consistently and damagingly spread rumours about western nations funding the _Hitobito_. The radio announcer captured the tenor of the newest accusations, the west’s immediate response and the east’s overly aggressive counter-response.

Haruki knew the west had been building up its stockpile of weapons, both conventional and otherwise, since their bitter defeat in the second war. And he knew Tachibana was itching for a chance to prove the east’s superiority once and for all; to return it to its glory days of old. And Eurote, still under Minister Andrea Rossi’s 'interim' rule that had stretched to a ten-year tenure indistinguishable from Mussolin's, was anxious to maintain its foothold as one of the world’s superpowers.

In spite of the unsteady peace inspired nine years ago by the disaster at Roskilde, the house of cards was about ready to fall again.

* * *

And yet there were those who maintained what Ryoumei Fukushima believed to be a nauseatingly optimistic outlook about humanity. One of these was Ambassador Gregor Feulner, who lived in the eastern capital and was an old acquaintance of Haruki’s from his time in the west.

Haruki knew Ryoumei would think that way of the old ambassador because he had heard him say so, in those exact words, to the ambassador’s face. Haruki had listened in to the heated conversations they had shared over the years, where Ryoumei argued vehemently that the world was close to blowing itself to pieces while Feulner argued just as voraciously on behalf of humanity’s goodness.

Feulner, now in his early sixties, affably round with an impressive moustache to counter his balding head, had once visited a flight school in the west on a diplomatic trip and taken a liking to the young men from the east, both of whom spoke several languages fluently and had trained in both east and west. He had a particular fondness for the young Yamamoto, in whom Feulner had seen a rare and fascinating combination of liveliness, intelligence and ambition. He had often wondered where Haruki’s drive came from.

Upon returning to his home in the east, the ambassador frequently invited both young men to the embassy for meetings with an impressive set of connections that he had gathered over the years. Diplomats and military leaders and ex-pats of all kinds from all over the world. Spies would abound at their meetings, for sure, as he joked. Just so they could see that no one had anything to hide.

Naturally, Feulner and the new emperor never saw eye-to-eye. In fact, Feulner came dangerously close, once or twice, to vocalising his regret over the abdication of Meiji whom he considered a dear personal friend. However, as the ambassador appointed by a leading western nation, there wasn’t much Tachibana could do about his presence in the country.

Haruki had once quietly warned Feulner that people who were even less vocal than he was sometimes disappeared in the dead of night. Feulner brushed off Haruki’s concerns, claiming that his vocalness was precisely what would save him.

‘Tachibana can’t touch me,’ he said dismissively. ‘Half the world would miss me if I disappeared. Mark my words, getting rid of this old ambassador will be his undoing.’

His brashness and arrogance, even a year ago, had reminded Haruki quite strongly of Klaus and he had simply smiled.

Feulner was committed, as Meiji had been, to maintaining peace between nations and halting the progress of nuclear weapons where he could. Though his optimism continued to impress, Haruki always came away from phone calls or meetings with Feulner feeling like they were all treading on ice that was about to break at any moment.

That evening, after he returned to his office followed by Kolya, Hasebe and Aizawa, his mind still buzzing from their run-in with an old _Hitobito_ tripwire, Haruki had barely taken a seat at his desk before he received an unexpected call from Feulner.

‘They’re sending all the western ambassadors home, dear boy,’ Feulner said before Haruki could even speak. Despite his own news, he managed to sound somewhat upbeat. ‘Precautionary and all that, you know how it goes. In case war’s declared. Paranoid fools, if you ask me. Not that anyone does ask me.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Ambassador,’ Haruki replied sincerely, though he felt more and more inclined to agree with Ryoumei in those days.

‘I’m throwing a last-minute going-away soirée here tonight,’ Feulner continued. ‘Getting everyone together for one final hurrah before we start packing.'

'Now?' Haruki said incredulously. 'Ambassador, don't you think it might be considered -?'

'I've heard it all, my boy. Insensitive? Implausible? Dangerous? Whatever you're about to say, consider it precisely the reason for why I've chosen to do it. Do come along, and bring that eligible Eurotean with you. I’m planning to marry him off to one of my daughters tonight while I have the chance.’

Haruki grinned. He told the ambassador he’d have to get back to him.

After he hung up, he sat back in his chair with a sigh that only Kolya heard. He wondered idly where Kaiser was. The dog hadn't been waiting by the front gates when Haruki returned. Across from him, Hasebe and Aizawa were discussing the tripwire ambush in low voices. They suddenly seemed miles away.

Sometimes, Haruki realised, a single day seemed long enough to take up several volumes while the months around it could be captured in Morse dits. He thought of everything that had happened that day. Everything that had happened in the past year.

He found himself wondering where it was all headed.

And how it would all end.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Klaus rapped anxiously on the door of the commander’s bedroom.

‘Haruki?’

‘Come in,’ Haruki called from inside.

Klaus swung the door open into the familiar room and Kaiser bounded in ahead of him, emitting a few soft whines of relief.

The carpet and curtains had been replaced and there were more light fixtures than Klaus remembered. Aside from the fact that the dim, ethereal blue of his memories were now flooded by the radiant yellow glow of both ceiling lights and the lamp on the nightstand, the room was more or less the same as it had been almost ten years ago. The large bed. The desk and chair by the window.

And the young commander by the mirror.

Klaus did a double-take.

‘Is everything alright?’ Haruki asked, turning around.

‘Yeah. Just checking you’re... okay.’

Haruki wore a white long-sleeved collared shirt and black pants with tight, crisp creases. Over his shirt, he wore a tight-fitting black vest with buttons that caught the light in the same way his hair did. A slim waist offset by the expansive white sleeves.

Klaus felt a warm flare of surprise.

‘Looking sharp there, kid.’

Haruki smiled absently as he tried to do up his left cuff. ‘Thanks.’ He looked up and focused on what Klaus had said previously. ‘And I’m fine, really. We’re all okay. One of the jeeps was scratched but no one was hurt. It was probably one of the earliest traps the _Hitobito_ rigged. I doubt they'd even remember it was there.’

He hesitated, on the point of sharing his feeling that it was an omen of some kind. He decided against it.

Klaus remembered waking to the sound of Kaiser scratching on the door, whining to be let out. He remembered how something awful had spiked in his chest when the lieutenant he stopped in the courtyard told him about what had happened during the patrol. Though he had been assured that the commander and all his men were fine, seeing Haruki still brought him relief.

There was a small pause after which, instead of asking more about the ambush, Klaus heard himself asking, ‘Where are you off to?’

‘The ambassador’s invited me to a – thing.’

‘Thing?’

Haruki explained Feulner’s phone call.

‘He’s invited people from all over the province for what he calls a going-away soirée, can you believe it? His way of sticking it to the Brass. Kolya and I have been dragged to something similar once before.’

Klaus chuckled despite himself. From what Haruki had told him of Feulner, it sounded exactly like the kind of thing he would pull.

‘I wasn’t going to go,’ Haruki continued, sounding a little tired, ‘but in the end Hasebe figured it might help.’

‘Hasebe? Doesn’t sound like him.’

‘He’s not crazy about Feulner,’ Haruki admitted, recalling how much Feulner had ruffled Hasebe’s feathers on the few occasions they met. ‘But I think he respects him. The way he sees it, Feulner’s doing it as a gesture of goodwill, as usual. And there’ll be people from east and west and everywhere, really. Hasebe said it might be our last chance to rub shoulders with higher-ups in other countries before that kind of thing starts getting labelled suspicious. Or even treasonous.’

Klaus understood only too well. He also reflected, with some dry amusement, on how far Hasebe had come since the xenophobic Grand Chamberlain he had once been. For a moment, he allowed himself the flattering thought that the colonel's transformation perhaps owed, in part, to Klaus' own influence in the last war.

‘Anyway, I’ll only be gone a few hours,’ Haruki went on. ‘Kolya's coming with me.’

Most of Haruki's hair was swept back but wayward strands still fell over his forehead as he struggled with the cuff link again.

‘Here, let me,’ Klaus offered, stepping forward.

Glancing up, Haruki felt an entirely unwarranted spike in nervousness.

‘Oh. No, it’s okay.’

‘I got it.’

Haruki’s pulse hit the roof for no earthly reason when Klaus took his wrist.

As he pulled the brass links through the openings, Klaus noticed Haruki’s right cuffs were already done.

‘You’re left-handed,’ he gathered.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki replied, more self-consciously than he intended.

‘Me too.’

‘Really? I – I didn’t know.’

Haruki berated himself over how unnecessarily strained his reply sounded. He tried to look at something other than Klaus’ hands.

Klaus then noticed the design on the cuff links and smiled in surprise.

‘Are those –?’

‘Yeah.’ Haruki touched his thumb to the little brass airplanes. ‘A parting gift from someone in flight school.’

He stared at them, the little detail on the wings, and his mind drifted to his days in flight school. The friends he had made. One in particular.

Klaus noticed his look of preoccupation and wondered if he recognised it.

'Once you've had a taste for the air, nothing on the ground ever quite measures up, does it?'

Haruki's eyes met his. Deep brown, slightly wide in surprise, reflecting glimmers of light.

'No,' he agreed. 'Nothing ever does.'

He realised in that moment how much he truly missed it. He always felt strange little jabs of envy whenever Ryoumei told him over the phone about their new training formations in the air.

But the Fifteenth had been his home once. And it had welcomed him back. And he probably had the division to thank, in part, for why Klaus had returned. So he was grateful to the Fifteenth, and he knew he was where he needed to be. Not only that, he now had someone who was able to share the unique, constant, niggling restlessness of an airman who was grounded. They exchanged a brief, meaningful glance.

And then a sudden thought came to him.

‘Do you want to come with us?’

Klaus seemed confused.

‘Where?’

‘To Feulner’s.’

‘What, tonight?’

‘Yes. You might be able to help me get a gauge on what’s going on in the west.' The more he thought about it, the more he wanted Klaus there. 'Knowing Feulner, you might even run into some of your old connections from the last war.’

But Klaus' head was as far as it could possibly be from an idealistic old man's soirée.

‘I don’t know, kid…’

Haruki watched him hopefully and Klaus felt his resistance slowly starting to give way. He thought about Haruki's near-miss that afternoon, which had happened when he hadn't been there.

‘I didn’t pack a tux before I came here though, believe it or not.’

Uncannily timed, there was a knock on the door and Kolya entered. His face registered mild surprise when he saw Klaus in the commander’s bedroom. He was decked out in a well-cut black suit. Klaus' lips twisted into a smile at the sight of his straight, expressionless face above a jaunty bow tie.

Earlier that year, upon learning that Kolya di Lupo didn't own a single suit, Ambassador Feulner had three of them made for the Eurotean. Haruki suggested that one of them would most likely fit Klaus.

Klaus grimly eyed Kolya’s shoulder span and height. He sighed.

‘I hate that you’re right.’

* * *

As Haruki expected, Klaus and Ambassador Feulner took to one another immediately.

'Where have you been hiding this one, my boy?' Feulner demanded happily. 'Now I can marry off all three of my daughters in one night, if any of them ever listened to a word their poor father said.'

He beckoned to a waiter to bring them drinks while Haruki and Klaus smiled a little sheepishly and Kolya remained unfazed. Klaus wore a jet black suit that fit him far better than he cared to admit.

'You're a marvel, Commander, I've always seen it,' Feulner went on, pressing drinks into all of their hands. 'An inspiration to us all! You have a Westerner on your left and a Eurotean on your right.'

'And a dog back at the compound,' Klaus added dryly. 'He's covered all species.'

Feulner laughed in delight. 'How splendid!'

The embassy was a lot more flamboyant than Klaus had anticipated. It was a multi-storey affair with dim chandeliers, balconies and a jazz band playing at the head of a long room. Only the paintings on the walls, which captured snow-capped mountains and frothy ocean waves, hinted at the far more subtle beauty of the land beyond the walls.

Ryoumei was also there, wearing a look that said he was annoyed by that very fact, though each time he turned to his wife, who was heavily pregnant, his expression noticeably softened. Haruki was happy to see him.

When Feulner pulled Haruki away to introduce him to a Eurotean lieutenant general, Klaus and Ryoumei exchanged a look.

'Glad you came,' Ryoumei said brusquely.

Klaus knew he wasn't referring to the party.

'Me too,' he said after a pause.

The first hour spilled slowly into the second.

Despite Feulner’s good humour and the warming sight of Haruki holding a glass of champagne and engrossed in conversation from across the room, Klaus found himself succumbing to a familiar restlessness. He left the ambassador in the company of Ryoumei, with whom he had already engaged in a spirited debate. He had placed his champagne glass on one of the linen-covered tables after only a few sips. He felt like he wasn’t really there. He found himself wishing he was back in the office at the compound helping Haruki work through his plans for the next drill, with only Haruki and his two ever-present shadows for company.

The upbeat jazz melody played a loud, final note to applause. After a small silence filled with chattering and chinking glasses, Klaus heard a familiar set of chords, soft and delicate. The chords that carried a rose garden and a dusty amber lamp.

And suddenly, Klaus' collar was on too tight. His stomach churned. He turned instinctively for the door, accidentally jostling a white-coated waiter behind him, and saw that the exit to a balcony was closer. He slipped away in time, just before the lyrics began.

* * *

In the open air, which was mild for a winter evening, his pulse slowly settled. White curtains blew through the doors that he hadn’t closed fully in his rush. Brief snatches of the song still found him, snagging on him like little twigs. It wasn’t Reinhart’s voice. In fact, it was a male voice. Low and smooth where Heidi's had been husky and sultry. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

He loosened his bow tie and lit up a cigarette. A few puffs later, he started to feel a bit more like himself. Crowds no longer suited him, he realised.

Moonlight shone on the grounds before the embassy. The city slept beyond the vaulted fence. Over rooftops in the distance, Klaus thought he could spy the tall perimeter of the Imperial Palace. He wondered where Meiji was and hoped he was safe.

The breezy, moonlit night reminded him of another just like it where he had been wearing something similar. Taki had worn white. They had left the jazz club where Heidi had crooned away and Klaus had led him through the trees to the boathouse. They had spoken of Claudia’s illness. Klaus still remembered his relief over her recovery. How naïve it all seemed now. How foolish he had been. How young.

He had said something to Taki as they strolled onto the pier where the lake stirred beneath the silvery glow of the moon. He had said something, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Either way, after he spoke, he had bent low, his hands still in pockets, and kissed Taki on the cheek.

The look on Taki's face when he looked up stayed with Klaus over the years. It had made him pull Taki close and kiss him deeply. He remembered how Taki’s lips, cold at first in the night air, had warmed almost immediately. A combination of where they were and the wine and the way Taki looked in white had all come together in an electric charge that made Klaus crave more. The boathouse loomed behind them and he pushed Taki against it without any further thought.

Taki had reached up to his chest, his hands clenching his lapels subconsciously. Klaus was sure he imagined it when Taki’s fingers moved to the buttons of his shirt. At no point in the eight years they had been together had Taki ever made the move to undress him. But Klaus allowed himself the fantasy anyway. In reality, he had spun Taki around and ground his hips against his lower back as he palmed his chest and stomach. Taki's buttons were undone gently enough, Klaus being conscious of the fact that they had to return to Claudia and Wilhelm looking somewhat composed. Once his shirt was open, Klaus felt the warm skin of his throat.

Then Klaus turned him back around and held him up against the side of the boathouse. He felt Taki shiver, like he knew what was coming.

 _I’m too heavy,_ he had said, his voice strained and breathless.

Klaus had smiled at him.

_You’re perfect._

And he was in, and Taki’s back and neck arched in response, the moonlight shining on his Adam’s apple, falling like liquid over his hair.

Almost ten years later, on a balcony in the east, Klaus let out a slow breath. He turned, cigarette in hand, and leaned against the railing. The song was almost over and the sounds of the party beyond wafted through the door along with the curtain. He wished he could remember what it was he had told Taki right before he had leaned down to kiss his cheek. It probably hadn’t been important. But the little things seemed all the more precious now, a decade later.

He wished he could remember what he had said. He wished he had said more. He wished Taki had said more. There, again, was the tiny thorn. Thorns and roses, after all, he reminded himself. Can’t have one without the other. Time and time again, Klaus had come to accept that Taki could never give all of himself to him. Everything he had given, and given up, already went beyond anything Klaus hoped for. Klaus had gone over the words _You’re everything_ so many times they seemed weathered and thin. He had gone over the words Taki had said to him while Klaus held him close in No Man’s Land; words Taki, in all likelihood, barely remembered.

And yet, a part of him was still waiting for the rest. A guilty, hopeful, bruised little voice had always told him that when enough years had passed, Taki would suddenly turn to him and his love would come pouring out of him and Klaus would be forgiven for everything he had ever done and he could finally stop having to pay attention; stop having to look for it in the details. It was a resolution Klaus knew would never happen. And yet –

The paradox and injustice of it, that the gods had struck before the resolution that would never happen, had caused him no end of pain after Taki died. Now, however, he felt around the thorn, like he had learned to do in his youth. So he could feel it without being pierced by it. And he realised that a very small part of him had finally, perhaps, come to peace with it. He wondered when exactly it had happened.

The balcony door inched open. Klaus looked up.

Haruki stood on the threshold, champagne in hand, wearing a look of concern. Beyond him, Klaus glimpsed the outline of Kolya, facing away, as though he had stationed himself there while his commander stepped out.

‘Checking up on me?’ Klaus guessed with a smile.

Haruki seemed apologetic. ‘I saw you come out here and I thought you looked a little…’

Klaus chuckled. Despite the twelve-year age gap separating them, he wondered which of them had taken on the parental role.

‘I’m okay,’ he said.

Haruki closed the door behind him and came to the railing. The look on his face reminded Klaus of the cadet who had climbed a tree just to make sure he was alright.

‘We can leave if you’re not feeling up to it.’

‘I just needed some air, kid. Really.’

Nevertheless, Haruki felt guilty for having convinced him to come.

Klaus lit another cigarette and considered the champagne Haruki was still holding. He thought of Meiji.

‘Don’t suppose you smoke?’ he said, inclining his pack.

‘No, I never could get used to the taste. Ryoumei smoked a lot though, through flight school. He stopped when he got married because Keiko doesn’t like it.’

‘His wife?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They seem happy.’

'They are,' Haruki said, leaning against the railing. 'I was his best man at their wedding.’

Klaus reflected on that silently as he took a drag.

‘The cadets are all grown up,’ he observed. He glanced sideways, wondering how much he could get Haruki to divulge. ‘What about you? Any takers?’

A small, nervous chuckle.

‘No, I – there were a few back in the west. But nothing… landed.’

‘Westerners, huh? I’d advise against it, Commander. We can be a handful.’

Another laugh that sounded more relaxed. Klaus knew it was an opportunity to ask him about Kolya, but he didn’t want to put Haruki on edge again. He watched the young commander raise the slender champagne flute and take a sip.

Haruki glanced up and caught his eye. He hesitated.

It had been a month since he found Klaus sitting against the side of his shed in the snow. He knew Klaus never spoke of Taki’s death and always reacted strangely whenever anyone else said his name. But he felt he had to try.

‘Klaus, I’ve been meaning to ask how – how you’ve been. Recently, I mean. Since… you know, since we last…’

Klaus felt a ripple of affection over the edgy, awkward words that trailed off.

‘I’ve been behaving, kid. I promise.’

In the short silence, Haruki wondered if he should clarify.

_I meant how you’re feeling. And coping._

‘That’s good,’ he said instead.

When he looked up, there was that same faraway look in Klaus’ eye that made Haruki feel like he had been left behind.

‘It’s his birthday tomorrow,’ Klaus said.

Haruki's pulse surged again. It was the first time, in the three months since Klaus had arrived at the compound, that he had spoken of Taki like that.

There was a moonlit pause. Haruki listened to the trees rustle in the grounds below and wondered what to say.

‘I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you,’ he said at length, again feeling like words, his words at any rate, were entirely inadequate.

But Klaus considered him thoughtfully.

‘I think I’ve figured something out,’ Klaus said, his tone somewhat different. Haruki had heard it once before, when Klaus stood in the wheat field and spoke of their life at the cottage. ‘It's the same thing I've figured out over and over again but it's clearer now, I think. In hindsight.'

'In hindsight?'

Klaus seemed lost in a long, ponderous silence, eyes on his cigarette.

'When you spend enough of your life searching… or, you know, waiting for something…' In the pause, a gentle gust swept his hair forward. ‘There comes a point where it almost doesn’t matter that you’ll never have it. It was enough to have been that close.’ Another pause. ‘I don't know if that makes any kind of sense.'

Haruki stared, feeling something straining and growing in his chest. It was like Klaus had taken the words from a hidden place somewhere inside him.

'It makes perfect sense.'

Klaus looked at him. He hadn't expected that quiet conviction in his tone.

'Really?'

'Yeah, I...' Haruki's heart beat faster. He knew he most definitely ought to stop talking. He wondered how much of it owed to the champagne that Feulner had forced into his hand. 'I know exactly what that feels like.'

Klaus noticed the small flush in his cheeks, only barely illuminated by moonlight and the golden glow beyond the curtain. Haruki was staring at the balcony floor, his empty flute in the hand that was braced against the stone railing behind him. He glanced up, his gaze fleeting but his eyes as wide and soulful as ever. Then they flicked to the gentle hubbub within and back to the floor.

Following his gaze, Klaus saw the firm outline near the curtain. He wondered again.

'Kolya doesn't seem like the type to give much away,' he said, trying to sound both sympathetic and nonchalant at the same time.

Haruki blinked in slight confusion. 'Kolya?'

Klaus watched him carefully.

'I... I guess not.' Haruki was caught in a current of mild emotions, the foremost of which was relief that he hadn't given himself away. He glanced at where Kolya was standing. ‘He’s always been quiet. It made me nervous when I first met him, but I'm used to it now. It’s just who he is.'

In more ways than one, that night reminded Klaus of another he had spent in a courtyard in Eurote, where he and Meiji had lamented the silences of those they held dear.

'You said you met him during a military operation?'

‘Yes.’

Again, Klaus thought he detected a hint of protectiveness.

‘What happened?’ he asked gently.

Haruki looked at him for a long moment.

‘I promised Kolya I wouldn’t tell anyone the details.’

Klaus waited. Haruki thumbed the edge of his glass.

‘He was part of a special squad in Rossi’s army. They were forced to do awful things to their own people. And one day, about a year ago, Kolya was told to carry out an order and he… refused.’ A hint of hesitation, and Haruki decided not to elaborate. It was like a shadow had fallen over his face. ‘He was sentenced to military execution.’

‘Shit,’ Klaus said softly, throwing a surprised glance at the outline by the window.

‘I stepped in before they went through with it,’ Haruki went on. ‘And afterwards, he felt... he said he owed me his life. In the end, no matter what I said, he insisted on coming back with me.’

Klaus processed silently.

‘Sounds like he cares for you a lot,’ he finished.

Something flickered across Haruki’s face.

‘He does. Last winter, he was the one who pulled me from the jeep when it went up in flames. No one else could get the door open.’

The thought of Haruki in a burning jeep made a prickle run over Klaus’ skin, just like it did when Ryoumei first told him about the attack.

‘I read in the report that you were hurt.’

‘A few burns,’ Haruki said, almost glibly. ‘I didn’t lose anyone that day, which is what matters.’

Klaus had the sense he was downplaying his injuries. His back and arm, from memory, was what Ryoumei had said. Klaus found his eyes wandering there, where his body was covered by shirtsleeves and a silky black vest. He tried not to think of Haruki in pain.

The sound of tinkling laughter issued from within.

‘I don’t think I was much use to you in there,’ Klaus said.

‘That’s okay. I think we can afford one night off. Before…’

He cut himself off lest he sound morbid. But Klaus finished for him.

‘Before the _Hitobito_ and a nuclear war with the west and whatever else the gods have in store?’ he said.

There was a faint smirk playing on his lips. Haruki recognised his own words and smiled back.

Before he could reply, Kolya opened the door to the balcony. They both glanced round.

‘Sir,’ Kolya said, his voice as heavy and expressionless as ever. ‘Something’s happening.’

* * *

Minutes later, they were all crowded around Ambassador Feulner’s cabinet-sized radio in an adjoining room. The party continued in the main hall, though it was a great deal more subdued. The news had rippled through the crowd.

A few moments ago, Tachibana had declared war on the west.

The reforged Western Alliance responded in kind.

Rossi pledged his troops and his resources to the east.

And the rest of the world fell into a loud, ominous silence.

* * *

The same silence fell in the room when Feulner turned the dial down to a murmur. Haruki, feeling a little numb, glanced around him and saw that several of the nation’s division commanders, colonels and even lieutenant generals were present, and all their faces displayed the same resigned shock he felt. It appeared Tachibana and Nakamori had made the decision unilaterally without even consulting their entire military cabinet.

‘A cold war no longer,’ Feulner summarised. He walked slowly over to the sideboard and poured himself another gin and tonic.

Klaus, Kolya and Ryoumei stood near Haruki in silence. Like the rest of the room, they were reminded of what they had been doing the last time war between nations had been declared.

Haruki and Ryoumei had stood with their peers before their commanding officer, who told them they were now cadets of the Fifteenth Armoured Division in a time of war and they would be expected to fight when their country called for them.

Kolya had been working at the mill when their supervisor told them the news and the image flashed before his eyes again, the same dream he had had ever since he was boy, and he knew immediately that he would enlist.

And Klaus had waited for Taki in a corridor of Luckenwalde, moments away from hearing that Taki was to be deported.

Ambassador Gregor Feulner sighed into his glass.

‘The absolute lowest point humanity can reach,’ he lamented with a sad smile, ‘is when the pessimists are rewarded and the optimists are made fools of.’

Ryoumei looked strangely regretful then, as though the declaration of war was suddenly on his head alone. Haruki almost smiled.

‘At the risk of making an even greater fool of myself,’ Feulner went on, ‘I ask each of you not to give up hope. Remember this night and how we all came together in spite of clan and creed. I’m sure I will see you again on the other side of this. As friends,’ he added.

* * *

The party ended early and quietly. Haruki bade Ryoumei and his wife farewell. Klaus watched him, and watched the way Kolya watched him. He knew then that they would do whatever it took to see their commander through the war. On the drive home, he wondered about the kinds of thoughts that must be running through the young commander’s mind.

In that moment, however, Haruki’s mind was fixed on a single image. The image of a figure leaning against a balcony railing in Kolya's suit, in the split second before he knew anyone was watching. Tall and broad, his bow tie undone, his eyes carrying a soft sadness, and his golden hair having turned a paler, ghostly shade in the moonlight, almost the same shade as the cigarette smoke that lifted from his hand.


	51. Between the Commanders

In the vicinity of the national border, a Western Alliance infantry division had awoken to a living nightmare.

Across the rugged terrain where they had watched as many enemy soldiers die as their own comrades – a terrain that was being steadily scorched off the face of the Earth with shell blasts and bombs – there came a rumbling that seemed to originate from the planet’s core itself.

In fact, the rocks and debris at the soldiers’ feet seemed to come to life in the exact manner of an earthquake. And still bullets rained from Eastern soldiers across the firing lines, pushing them further and further back.

‘What the hell is that?’ a wide-eyed sergeant asked, indicating the rumbling.

‘I don’t know,’ his colonel yelled back, hand on his helmet and crouched behind a rocky outcrop, firing whenever he had the chance.

The rumbling seemed to get louder. The colonel tried to spy through the clouds of settling debris and occasional flares of a shell hitting the earth.

Then he remembered. It was nothing more than a footnote in his training. Something that his countrymen had faced in the previous war, and against which they had lost resoundingly.

But that had happened right on the border of the Eastern Country itself. Not all the way out here, where the west was simply defending its own borders against a new, rapacious east that had declared war.

Could they really have come all the way out here in –?

 _‘Tanks!’_  the radio hollered.  _’Tank company straight ahead! Deploy anti-tank missiles!’_

‘We can’t change our trajectory in time!’ the colonel shouted back.

At that moment, the sound morphed into a shape through the smoke. They thundered in over the ground, canons poised, moving at a speed that was breathtaking for monsters of their size. All state-of-the-art, with barely a dent in them, and all bearing the insignia of a triple-leafed rose.

‘Stand – stand your ground!’

The colonel watched as men from another infantry poured in front of him, scrambling to get the anti-tank missiles ready. He felt a urgent flare of hope – perhaps they might be able to load up and swing and aim in time –

And then there was a different kind of roar, higher pitched and somehow even angrier, sounding over the tops of the incoming tanks. A motorbike. A flash of yellow and steel. And an entire belt of grenades that was let loose over the front line.

The anti-tank missiles and the men operating them were lost in the explosions. The tanks followed through with booming, ear-splitting canon blasts that uprooted man, machine and land. The colonel watched, appalled.

And the tanks thundered past, even past where the colonel was hunkering with the radio and his wide-eyed sergeant.

‘Fall back,’ the colonel ordered, the words coming out before he had even thought of them. ‘Fall back, now. They’re through the front lines. I repeat, fall back!  _Retreat!’_

* * *

The defence was crushed. The fort-like buildings on the outskirts of the border were either decimated or had caved in, their sad metal frames bare in the open air. Bodies littered the ground in the dozens and dozens. Mostly western soldiers. Killed right at the border of their own land.

Klaus’ heart was surprisingly heavy when he flipped his goggles up. The lull after a battle was always loud. It always brought out each small movement – glass tinkling, bricks tumbling, the occasional, awful groans of unfathomable pain.

He had brought the bike to a stop not far from the leading tank. It wasn’t Murakumo but one of the newer models; lower to the ground, faster and stronger. Still, it was Haruki who emerged from the hatch. Klaus saw that his face was also grim. He suddenly recalled their training drills back in the east when Haruki came out with his bright smile to the equally glowing faces of men in other tanks.

Now, their eyes met across the wasteland they themselves had created. And there was no room for joy, even in victory.

Klaus swung his leg off his bike – again, not his own but a newer model that they had found for him. It was an upgrade, objectively, but Klaus still felt a nostalgic pull for his old girl back in the east, whose improvements under Haruki’s hand had nevertheless preserved her as she was.

In the few weeks that had passed since war was declared, half of each division in the east had been deployed to the front lines. During the last war, the Western Alliance had brought the fight to the east’s border. Now, there was no doubt who was aggressor and who was defender.

Half of the Fifteenth Armoured Division had been dispatched. The newest tanks and equipment had gone with them, along with half the manpower. The other half, including Murakumo, had remained at home to fight the civil war against the  _Hitobito._ It had been decided that the division’s third in command, Colonel Motohara, would be sent to lead their men in the Western Front while Haruki, who had trained for months to fight the rebels, would remain at the compound.

The commander had been torn by the decision. On the one hand, it didn’t feel right abandoning the division when they could face a rebel attack at any moment. On the other, he knew the real danger was out there at the doorstep of the west where their enemies were mounting a desperate defence.

In the end, he had compromised by accompanying Motohara for the first few days on the Western Front. Klaus and Kolya went with him.

It was a cold winter’s day that saw the east’s latest victory. Clouds gathered with a mind to release fresh snow, though there was nothing white on the ground. Nothing but rubble and upturned earth. Klaus’ coat flapped as he crossed the short distance from his bike to the leading tank where Kolya and Haruki were standing.

‘Well done, kid,’ Klaus said as he drew near. ‘Not bad for a first strike.’

Though clearly relieved to see that Klaus had made it through without a scratch, the smile Haruki gave him in response was thin and forced. The commander wiped sweat from his forehead and surveyed the damage around them. The rubble. The bodies.

Kolya had clambered out of the tank ahead of Haruki to scope out the surroundings and he still kept an eye out even after his commander was on the ground. Klaus saw the way Kolya's eyes darted to the partially collapsed buildings, watching for snipers. His vigilance on the commander’s behalf reassured Klaus.

‘How’d she handle?’ Klaus asked, with a backwards glance at the newer tank that Haruki had commanded.

‘Well enough,’ Haruki replied, following his gaze. ‘Not as well as Murakumo, though. He's older but I feel like I can handle him better than the new ones.’

‘Him, huh? I feel the same way about my bike back home. Except she’s a she.’

Haruki’s smile was, again, a little more preoccupied than usual.

They waited for the second tank to roll to a stop nearby. Motohara emerged from the hatch. Flanked by soldiers with eyes alert and guns drawn, he and Haruki walked a little further afield so they could see past the border at the distant western settlement where the enemy had retreated.

After covering initial reports about casualties and losses, they confirmed something that had been weighing heavily on their minds and on the minds of every soldier and officer and commander in both east and west.

‘Any sign they're using nuclear artillery?’ Haruki asked.

‘No, sir,’ Motohara replied. ‘None of the other divisions have reported it either.’

The wind lifted Haruki’s hair and coat. His face didn’t change as he stared west, but Klaus could sense his relief. And his continuing anxiety.

* * *

_A WEEK AGO_

The Imperial Palace hadn’t changed significantly from Klaus’ memory of it. Klaus walked through the familiar entrance hall with suspicious eyes, but it didn’t bear any hallmarks of tyranny. There were still the flowers frozen and falling. The gilded frames and long murals.

And the Throne Room was as majestic as ever, with perhaps only a note or two of ostentation that Meiji hadn’t had. Klaus forgot to see if the heron in the grounds beyond had either survived or left any kin behind. They were promptly ushered into the war room where military leaders and political advisors took their seats around an enormous table. Klaus and Hasebe sat on either side of Haruki. Since he wasn’t an officer, Kolya had been forced to wait by the car.

Emperor Tachibana then entered and sat at the head of the table. His thin moustache and thick eyebrows were as straight and stiff as ever. Officious eyes watched the room from beneath the short rows of red bead curtains hanging from his headdress. The rest of his raiment was also red.

It was the first time Klaus had set eyes on Tachibana in nine years.

His weapons. His canisters. His fault.

Only the fact that Roskilde had been an accident, one that no one could have foreseen or prevented, kept Klaus from wanting to leap for the man’s throat. Haruki was aware of this and had kept a close eye on Klaus during the drive and especially when they were in the war room. He saw the smouldering eyes and the clenched jaw and wondered if it had been a mistake to bring him. He knew how dangerous it would be for Klaus, and their entire division, if Tachibana was angered in any way.

But as the hours dragged on, Klaus didn’t speak or put a toe out of line.

And besides a wayward glance or two, no one questioned Klaus’ presence, despite the fact that their nation was again at war with Klaus’ homeland.

It occurred to Haruki, with a sliver of pride, that perhaps most of them knew who he was. And perhaps, like everyone at the compound, they also knew everything Klaus had done for their country and for Taki in the past war.

Only Tachibana himself felt a squirm of resentment – almost discomfort – when he caught sight of Wolfstadt. He maintained a dignified silence, however, as the meeting progressed.

General Saigo Nakamori who sat beside him did most of the talking and fielded questions from the table. He would throw an occasional nod to the man handling the projector. Large maps materialised on the wall, with the borders of the west heavily marked and arrows aggressively piercing it at many angles. The war within their own borders was barely given any thought. There had only been one mention, early on, for each commander to deploy half their divisions to the Western Front, implying that the other half remain behind to deal with the  _Hitobito_. Clearly, Nakamori and the emperor were almost entirely focused on subduing the west.

It became steadily apparent to everyone there that the tension and rumours generated by the cold war had been used as a pretext for this new, very real war. But of course, neither Haruki nor the dozens of other men raised any objection of any kind. Until, that is, the issue of weapons was brought up. As soon as General Nakamori announced that they had been manufacturing and producing nuclear technology at a level that was finally able to be weaponised, a hush fell around the table that was different to the silences beforehand.

‘Of course, they haven’t been tested in combat yet,’ Nakamori went on. ‘And so, for now, they will only be used as a reserve measure. However, every branch of the military – including the air force – will be equipped with artillery, missiles and –’

‘Excuse me, General. Did you say they haven’t been tested?’

Haruki turned to look at the lieutenant general who had spoken. He recognised him from the evening at Feulner’s.

‘No,’ Nakamori replied stiffly. ‘With all of the spies sent in from the west it was impossible for us to conduct large-scale tests. However, we expect –’

‘I beg your pardon, General, but we’re talking about weapons whose impact we don’t understand. It could lay waste to entire cities. Not to mention that it puts our own armies at risk. If Roskilde is any indication –’

‘What happened at Roskilde is irrelevant. In the nine years since, we have –’

‘Irrelevant?’

The word came out of Klaus like a burst of hot steam.

Haruki’s pulse spiked. All heads turned to Klaus, whose gaze was suddenly razor-sharp.

‘So nothing that happened at Roskilde matters anymore, is that it?’ he said, his voice loud in the silence. ‘We throw some missiles over the border and take no responsibility?’

‘Watch your tone or I’ll have you removed,’ Nakamori warned.

‘Do you have any idea about the kind of damage you’re about to do?’ Klaus said, his voice strained.

‘That’s it,’ Nakamori said tersely, jowls set. He motioned to one of the guards stations around the room.

Unlike the general, however, Tachibana had noticed how several of the officers’ expressions had changed when Klaus spoke. As though they were almost relieved that someone had finally said it.

‘Hold on, General,’ he said quietly. ‘The captain raises a valid point.’

The emperor’s eyes met Klaus’. For long seconds, neither of them looked away. Haruki, though somewhat relieved at the emperor’s response, felt his pulse continue to hammer.

‘While I’m sure everyone here is grateful for your services in the previous war,’ Tachibana continued, ‘I would remind you that in this room, you are nothing more than a captain, and you will bear that in mind when you address General Nakamori.’

Klaus remained silent; a response that bordered on disrespectful. At least it wasn’t another outburst, Haruki thought helplessly.

‘Despite what you’re implying, General Nakamori and I have fully considered the ramifications of what we are proposing,’ Tachibana said, before turning to the room at large. ‘This is a new world we are in, gentlemen. It might not be savoury but it is reality. These weapons are the only thing that will deter our enemies. Enemies who, as all of our intelligence indicates, have weaponised the very same technology themselves.’

There was a small pause.

‘Only when we have a foothold in the west, only when we have made them aware of the new strength and superiority of the east, will our nation finally be secure. Only then will we be able to preserve and even strengthen our nation’s legacy. What we stand to gain is far greater than what we stand to lose.’

‘We could stand to lose  _everything_ ,’ Klaus returned before he could stop himself. His anger and disbelief were threatening to reach boiling point. It was suddenly like there was no one in the room except for himself and Tachibana. ‘Everything! Enough people have already been lost.’

‘How dare you address His Majesty without –’

But once again, Tachibana silenced Nakamori with a raise of his hand.

The entire nation knew of Reizen’s death and its cause. And he banked on the fact that everyone in that room was aware of Wolfstadt’s ties to Reizen. The restless glances from officers along the table, glances that darted between Wolfstadt and himself, confirmed his suspicions. It felt distinctly to Tachibana as though he was under the spotlight. His military cabinet now awaited their emperor’s response regarding what had befallen the young prince, whose absence from that very table suddenly seemed conspicuous.

 _Even in death,_  Tachibana thought with gritted teeth,  _Reizen continues to be a nuisance._

He lifted his chin slightly.

‘I believe I understand your insinuation, Captain. But I urge you and everyone else in this room to keep perspective. Taki Reizen’s death, regrettable though it was, has no bearing on –’

Klaus suddenly slammed his hand on the table loud enough for several people nearby to jump out of their skins.

Haruki flinched and looked round to see that Klaus had gotten to his feet. He was staring down the table at the emperor, eyes burning like Haruki had never seen them before. 

‘Don’t you  _ever_  say his name.’

A fierce, acerbic rumble that carried around the table. There was an awful silence. The emperor and his cohort, and all the other officers, were too stunned at first to say anything. The guard who had been motioned earlier took a few steps closer, though no one had ordered him to.

Klaus didn’t give him a chance to haul him out. He turned, ears still ringing, and headed for the large double doors at the end of the room. The anger that coursed through him was all-too familiar. He could feel it pulsing in his fingertips.

He didn’t expect anything to pull him out of the tinny ringing that clouded his mind at that moment. Least of all did he expect it to be Haruki’s voice, which sounded clearly from behind him.

‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but our party will be taking its leave. We’ll await the minutes of this meeting at our division.’

It took a few more steps for the words to sink in. Klaus stopped and turned. Haruki was standing and facing the emperor, his expression resolute.

Another smaller shock followed on the heels of the one left by Klaus. The emperor and the general now stared at the young commander.

‘You –’ Nakamori started. ‘Your emperor has not dismissed you, Commander.’

‘Then I await His Majesty’s dismissal,’ Haruki said smoothly.

A collective, silent intake of breath. There had been nothing at all impertinent in the commander’s words or even in his tone. And yet the stand he was making was clear.

Hasebe stared up at Haruki tensely. Then he too got to his feet beside his commander, wondering what exactly they were getting themselves into.

‘This is unacceptable, Commander,’ Nakamori spluttered.

‘It’s fine, General,’ Tachibana said evenly, eyeing Yamamoto with fresh interest. ‘Commander, you and your men are dismissed.’

‘Your Majesty,’ Haruki replied. His bow was stiff and perfect.

Klaus had been standing at the door, a little stunned. Haruki strode towards him without looking at him. Though Haruki’s face seemed as composed as his replies to Nakamori, Klaus thought his eyes carried just a hint of something fiercer. Hasebe followed him, looking a lot less calm.

Haruki breezed past Klaus and through the double doors. After Hasebe passed him as well, Klaus spared a glance at the silent table they were leaving behind. He took in the steely gazes of the emperor and the general. Then he turned to follow in the commander and colonel’s wake, his coat sweeping behind him.

Once they reached the front steps of the Entrance Hall, the guard who had followed them for good measure was replaced by Kolya, who noticed the look on Haruki’s face and fell in step behind him, wondering what had happened.

Klaus realised it was the first time he had ever seen Haruki angry.

In the crisp morning air, everything Klaus had said and done in the war room caught up with him. He had defied an emperor whose rule bordered on despotic. A few paces behind them, Hasebe seemed about ready to explode at him once they were out of the palace’s earshot. Klaus wondered how much damage he had done.

‘Haruki,’ he said finally, though he already knew an apology wouldn’t cut it. ‘Listen, I –’

Haruki pulled his head up and glanced to his left as though only just remembering Klaus was there.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, suddenly but quietly. His expression was familiar once more; keen and open.

Klaus was startled. He had expected a reprimand like those he had frequently received from Taki for doing much less.

‘Me? What do you –?’

And then it occurred to him why Haruki might have taken the stand that he did. It occurred to him that Haruki’s momentary flash of anger might not have been directed at him at all. Klaus stared. His shock and gratitude and exasperation melded together.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, kid,’ he said after a pause, wondering if he had even understood properly.

‘Done what?’

‘Back there, you – you didn’t have to do that for me.’

And then Haruki’s face turned a little colder. Like the anger had edged in again at the thought of Tachibana. He turned away.

‘Leaders should know better,’ he said quietly just as they reached the car and Kolya opened the door for him.

Klaus had no idea if he was referring to the war. Or the weapons. Or what Tachibana had said about legacy. Or what Tachibana had said about Taki. He even wondered if Haruki was referring to something as simple as the fact that Tachibana had spoken of Taki in front of Klaus, even though that thought seemed somewhat ridiculous.

Whatever it was, Klaus climbed into the backseat behind Haruki with newfound awe and pride. Haruki’s quiet anger and recklessness and poise was an exact replica of Taki’s. And yet, given the way it had all happened, it was also something he struggled to imagine Taki doing.

* * *

_BACK ON THE WESTERN FRONT_

A week later, after they tore down one of the Western Alliance defensive outposts, Klaus saw it again. Taki, both there and not, in Haruki’s posture and expressions and the decisions he had made. And the decisions he was about to make.

The snow held its breath but the wind freely swept across the scattered ruins around them. When it died down, they heard the sounds of trucks and jeeps rumbling up to cart their injured back to base.

And another jeep that didn’t bear the army medical insignia did their own rounds of the injured; their grim job was to haul injured enemy soldiers back to base as POWs.

Haruki watched the various jeeps going about their work. Stretchers and camouflage and lost limbs and groans and blood. The decision came to him slowly, like it emerged from the back of his mind where it had formed without his knowledge.

He took out his handheld radio and told the army patrol scouting for POWs to return to base.

‘But, sir,’ the crackled response sounded. ‘There are still wounded enemy soldiers in the vicinity.’

‘How many?’ Haruki asked.

‘Sir?’

‘How many do you have now? And how many more do you think there are?’

A number that was somewhere in the sixties. Haruki took another moment to calculate before he repeated his order for the jeep to return to base.

He then ordered more vehicles bearing the medical insignia to be sent. Enough to carry the sixty or so wounded enemy soldiers across to the edge of the settlement nearby where they were to be left for their own army to recover.

The act of taking POWs, though technically governed by international laws and treaties, often fell under the purview of the commanders themselves. More often than not, this meant that injured enemy soldiers were either taken prisoner, summarily executed or left to die so as to save time and resources.

Haruki’s order, on the other hand, was one that no one had heard before.

Still, it was carried out with no further questions asked. The trucks bearing wounded enemy soldiers approached the settlement with caution and left the soldiers there, some sitting on the ground, some in stretchers. After the jeeps turned back, they were retrieved by their own suspicious and confused army.

As the jeeps returned, Klaus threw Haruki a questioning glance, which Haruki had seen coming. He turned to meet his gaze. They were Klaus’ own countrymen, Haruki thought. Klaus’ own kin that they were tearing down by the hundreds.

‘We started this war,’ Haruki said, low enough so only Klaus could hear. He didn’t offer any further rationale. Klaus didn’t need him to.

Back at base, which was nothing more than a wide network of tents on a remote stretch of land outside the western border, they reviewed the day’s offense and sent confirmation to the other divisions that, yet again, there had been no sign of nuclear artillery being used.

And they sent confirmation to the capital that the west had yielded yet another defensive outpost.

‘That’ll keep Tachibana happy,’ Klaus observed tartly. He glanced at the commander. ‘What’s our next move, kid?’

A pause as Haruki thought over their past few days on the Western Front.

‘Motohara can take things from here,’ he decided. ‘Let’s go home.’

* * *

And so they went from one enemy to another.

Home, Klaus thought. Where Tachibana ruled with an iron fist and where the rebels were breathing down their necks, plotting away somewhere in the dark.

The struggle against the  _Hitobito_ , however, was fairly muted, especially when compared to the drama unfolding on the Western Front. A few days after they arrived back in the east, the Fifteenth responded to a scuffle in the centre of Hokane between possible rebel members and the police. It was a brawl that had escalated by the time their convoy arrived and several of Haruki’s men were injured. Despite this, their recent dismounted training manoeuvres, which Klaus had helped them to hone, served their convoy well. From behind jeeps and barricades, they managed to send the rebel party scattering, most of whom were chased and rounded up. No civilians had been harmed in the crossfire.

For Klaus, the hour they spent in Hokane didn’t stand out as much as the following day when he watched Haruki speak with his injured men in the infirmary. It was, in fact, a day that would stay with him for a while, as innocuous as it seemed at the time.

In the infirmary, Klaus and Suguri steadily avoided one another’s eye as Haruki spoke to the six soldiers who were either sitting or lying in bed, all of them having been patched up well by Suguri and the nurses. The room was all casts and bandages and smiles.

Klaus was surprised to find that Haruki knew a lot of them by name. He saw how they responded to Haruki’s presence. How they seemed better for it. He heard it before he saw it, when Kaiser trotted into the infirmary wing ahead of Haruki, eliciting a sudden, heartfelt chorus of greetings. And then Klaus saw it in their faces, which broke into wide smiles as the commander entered.

After a short, unadorned speech where Haruki said he had never been prouder to be their commander than he had been yesterday, he sat by one of them, a sergeant named Ao whom he had known as a cadet, and asked about the bullet that had grazed his right thigh. Ao scoffed and declared he had had closer calls while shaving. Their easy banter drew in the others, even the more reserved soldiers who were a little thrown by the commander’s visit.

One of the quieter ones, Ao revealed, had received a letter from his fiancé in the weeks prior which he carried around in his front pocket at all times, even in the middle of combat.

‘But he won’t tell us a single word from it, not even her name,’ Ao complained. ‘Or any other details about her,’ he added in an undertone to Haruki who chuckled.

He looked across the room.

‘Corporal Iwasaki, is it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the soldier called back, trying to sit upright and stand to attention despite his injured arm.

‘Let’s hear the letter,’ Haruki said, eyes simmering.

‘None of us will make fun, we swear,’ a delighted Ao was quick to add.

The corporal was clearly flustered.

‘Sir…’

‘Wolfpup’s given you an order, Corporal,’ Ao pointed out.

And so the soldier slowly drew out the much-folded piece of paper, ears burning, and began to read slowly.

‘To… to my dearest Toshiro –’

Wolf whistles and hooting abounded almost instantly and the corporal was lost in a scarlet flush. Even Klaus was beginning to feel sorry for him but Haruki only laughed and encouraged him to keep reading.

‘Every – every day, I think of you…’

As he progressed through the short and lovely letter from his beloved – punctuated faithfully by crass, good-natured calls from his comrades – Iwasaki himself began to smile. His flush receded and he read out the last few lines to a round of applause and requests that they be next in line for the girl if Iwasaki met an unfortunate end.

Klaus leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and smiled. He even thought he caught a ghost of a smile from Kolya where he stood by the door, though he couldn’t be sure.

He had wondered for a few days on the Western Front whether something of Haruki’s nature had been marred by the horrors of war. There had been so much of Taki in his distant, preoccupied gaze on the battlefield that he could only too easily imagine him retreating behind the pressures of his role. But he was relieved to find that, in some ways, he was still the same.

He remembered eavesdropping on Taki as he visited his men in the infirmary. How Master Torieda had told him not to cry.

_You must keep those feelings concealed. Out of sight. You are one of noble birth. You are a leader of men._

Klaus watched Haruki and wondered what Taki would have been like if he had been raised outside the shadow of the lofty pillars he was meant to uphold. How much of him would have been different.

Perhaps none at all, Klaus mused, thinking of Meiji and how similar his upbringing had been to Taki’s. After eight years away from everything, despite all the prince had given, there had still been so much he had held back.

And so Klaus watched Haruki and found himself wondering, absently, abstractly, and with only a minor ache, how much of Taki had really been Taki.

* * *

_ONE MONTH LATER_

Though each day brought something new for Klaus and for everyone at the division, there was one structure that he could rely on no matter what. The day would start with Taki. It would be spent with Haruki. And then it would end with Taki again.

_I’m never letting you go._

It was a promise Klaus had made to Taki on one of the nights when Taki had held onto his shirt and tears leaked from the pain in his bones.

The talons cut into Klaus only if he was alone for a long time. When that happened, to ease the pain, he would talk to Taki. He would clean his gun or polish his boots and recap that day. He imagined Taki to be lying stretched out on the bed behind him, or sometimes doing something in the other room, which in the shed equated to the en suite, though in Klaus’ mind it sometimes morphed into the kitchen back at the cottage.

He often spoke of Haruki.

‘You should have seen him take on the Western Alliance last month. Fast as a whip. His reflexes on the ground still aren’t quite in your league, though. But in other ways…’

Occasionally, amidst his little monologues to Taki, he would remember something to tell Haruki the following day. Ideas for offensives and how to prepare for the next  _Hitobito_  strike, whenever it might be. And just memories of his own time in Luckenwalde and flight school.

He and Haruki often found themselves speaking of light-hearted things, even in the midst of a war on two fronts, almost as though to remind themselves of what they were fighting for. Klaus smiled more and more - something Haruki noticed. Haruki wondered, sometimes, whether Klaus was doing it just so Haruki wouldn’t ask questions. He wondered what Klaus was like when he was alone.

Sometimes, when he was alone, Klaus couldn’t feel Taki’s presence strongly enough to speak to him. Sometimes he would wake from a dream or a nightmare in the dead of night and the aura he imagined and attributed to Taki, tinged by the soft purple of wisteria, would be gone and there was only that familiar ink-stain spreading beneath his ribs.

One night, in his fifth month at the compound, he awoke to the same feeling. The air was quiet and there was almost no light in the shed. And no matter how much he lay back and tried, he couldn’t recall the dream that had shaken him back to consciousness, nor could he fall back asleep.

So he pulled on his coat, thrust his gloveless hands into his pockets and strode out of his shed.

Winter was winding down but that night it was still bitterly cold and Klaus regretted his midnight sojourn only a few minutes in. He tried to focus on the soft, satisfying echo of his footfalls and how the trees personified themselves in the darkness; limbs and arms and hair and creatures could be seen in their outlines against a moonless, starless sky.

And there, somewhere behind the trees lining the courtyard, there was an amber glow in an upper storey. It loomed through the darkness like a candle flame, even though from that distance he knew it must be bright enough to light up an entire room.

As he turned the corner, he realised it was coming from Haruki’s office. He looked at his watch. A little after midnight. After a moment’s deliberation, he walked slowly in the direction of the light.

* * *

In the quiet, fire-lit office, beside Haruki’s feet, Kaiser cocked his ears and sat up.

A few minutes later, three short knocks jolted Haruki from his work at the desk. He checked his watch in slight puzzlement.

‘Kolya?’ he called.

The door opened.

‘Nope.’

Haruki’s smile of surprise was worth the walk.

‘Klaus, what are you doing up so late?’

‘Oh, you know. I was just wandering around in the dark.’ He strode in beside a happy Kaiser, who accompanied him to his seat like a valet. ‘Saw your light was on. Thought I’d interrupt whatever big, important thing you’re working on.’

‘It’s nothing important,’ said Haruki, still in his uniform, his eyes looking slightly worn after hours spent poring over the pages. It was rare for Klaus to find Haruki without Kolya’s hulking presence in the background. ‘I didn’t feel like sleeping so I thought I’d get some work done ahead of time.’

The room was warm enough for Klaus to shed his coat. He looked over his shoulder at the fire that was crackling merrily. He’d never noticed that Taki’s office had a fireplace.

Haruki happily closed his files.

As they spoke of the past few weeks, the subject swung back around to their tense brush with the emperor at the Imperial Palace.

‘It's been a month and we’re still alive and kicking,’ Klaus observed wryly. ‘No one’s been carted off in the middle of the night by Tachibana’s secret police or assassins or feudal ninjas or whatever the hell he uses to make people disappear. So we can’t have pissed him off that much.’

‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ Haruki said with a broad grin that made Klaus wonder whether, like him, Haruki sometimes filed away little things to mention to him. ‘I thought about what Feulner used to say. About how if Tachibana got rid of him, the entire world would come to know about it. So maybe it’s like that for us, too.’

‘Careful, kid. You’re getting a bigger head than me.’

‘No, I mean,’ Haruki laughed, ‘this division and this estate have always been important. Historically, and in the last war especially. I think our people and even other commanders look to this division almost as a… symbol. Of strength.’

Klaus was a little surprised to hear Haruki had given it so much thought.

‘So if anything were to happen to anyone here,’ Haruki said. ‘I don’t know if Tachibana would be able to stand up to the scrutiny.’

Klaus mused on thought that the Rosen Maiden was protecting them in more ways than one.

‘You might have a point.’

‘The division’s always come through for us,’ said Haruki, echoing his thoughts almost exactly. ‘For us and the people in this province.’

 _Hopefully I’ll be able to do the same,_  he thought but didn’t say.

A comfortable silence followed. Klaus had his left ankle propped up on his right knee and his hands laced behind his head, lost in thought. The fire’s gentle noises filled the room.

Haruki hesitated before asking. He was deterred by the memory of when he found Klaus by the side of his shed, barely aware of himself or his surroundings. But surely enough time had passed since that day.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked tentatively.

Klaus looked at him and raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Sure.’

Haruki pushed back his chair and went to the sideboard. He took out a few glasses and a bottle before he realised he only had his own drink of choice, something he only indulged in on the odd occasion that Ryoumei visited. He didn’t know what Klaus preferred.

‘Sorry,’ he said, turning with the bottle in hand. 'All I have is scotch.'

Klaus’ laugh was short and loud.

 _The kid could be our son,_ he had once said to Taki.

* * *

Over the past few months, the similarities and differences between the commanders had continued to spring up and catch Klaus unawares. He thought about it again as he sipped his scotch and Haruki leaned against the desk nearby and did the same.

Klaus spoke of his travels the previous year. It was like each country and city he recalled came back to life again, without the tendrils of sorrow, as he recounted it for his rapt audience. He described the people he had met, the most noteworthy of whom was the dark-skinned girl in a bar in Braxton. Haruki laughed and even blushed slightly at the way she had casually propositioned Klaus.

And as Haruki listened, he was reminded of the dark words uttered by Aizawa regarding flights and landings that he tried to characterise as suspicious. Haruki wished, suddenly, that Aizawa was there to hear to the way Klaus spoke of it now.

By the time either of them glanced at the clock, it was almost two in the morning.

Klaus got to his feet and stretched. ‘I’ll let you get some sleep, Commander. Shouldn’t have kept you this late.’

‘It’s okay, I’ll probably work for a while before I turn in anyway.’

Klaus pulled on his coat, eyeing the files on Haruki’s desk, and warned him not to tire himself out.

‘I was going to say your men need you rested and alert,’ Klaus went on, thinking of what he had seen in the infirmary a few weeks ago. ‘But by now I’m pretty sure they’d follow you to hell and back even if you were in Murakumo half-asleep.’

As he expected, the compliment was brushed aside by a slightly abashed, dismissive smile.

‘Night, kid,’ he said as he reached the door. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

It was only after the door closed that Haruki thought to reply, ‘No – no problem.’

Klaus didn’t hear him.

In the silence afterwards, Haruki clicked his tongue and sighed at himself and his juvenile gaucheness which still cropped up from time to time around Klaus. He found that his heart was beating just a little faster than it ought to be. He wondered how long it had been doing that. Surely not the whole time Klaus had been there?

He thought he caught Kaiser’s gaze out of the corner of his eye.

‘What?’ he said somewhat defensively.

But Kaiser’s face atop his front paws remained artfully canine; blank and innocent.

Haruki pushed off the table and walked around it to his chair. It took him a few moments before he was able to get back to work.

* * *

Despite how late it was and where he had just been, when Klaus returned to his shed, he found, as ever, that his day still ended with Taki. In that moment, he thought of how that unique contrast of pale skin and blue-black hair was something he had never come across in his life and probably never would again.

_I’m never letting you go._

Right before he fell asleep he found himself wondering whether scotch might have brought about the same soft flush on Taki’s face that he had seen on Haruki’s, in the office with a fireplace he didn’t know had been there all along.

* * *

Spring came round with news of more victories on the Western Front.

Despite this, Tachibana demanded yet more troops and equipment to be deployed. As the last of the snow melted, the number of men and tanks that remained at the division had been reduced to a third of its usual strength.

Still, training and drills progressed as normal. That afternoon, the weather permitted Klaus to discard his shirt altogether.

Haruki again struggled, at first, to focus. He found himself wondering idly how Klaus had maintained that bronze tan all through winter. But he didn’t have a great deal of time to wonder. Klaus’ first strike immediately put him on the defensive.

The men watched, again with bated breath, wondering if their commander would finally best the captain.

Alas, after a heated match that saw them both panting, Klaus got the better of Haruki again and even made him fall to the floor for the first time. Even there, however, Haruki’s smile preserved his dignity and the soldiers felt a familiar pride in tandem with disappointment. Smiling too, Klaus offered him a hand.

In the split-second after he pulled Haruki to his feet, like a streak of light that came from nowhere, Klaus felt the sudden urge to kiss him. And then, just like that, it was gone again.

Klaus blinked.

‘What’s wrong?’ Haruki asked, wondering if he had imagined the strange and subtle shift in Klaus’ features.

‘Nothing,’ Klaus replied, even as he took a step back.

Haruki turned to the unit he had just trained in order to dismiss them. They saluted their commander and headed for their quarters. Somewhat unsettled, Klaus did the same.

* * *

As he walked back to his shed with his shirt draped over his shoulder, he managed to rationalise it well enough. He realised with no small amount of shock that it had been over a year and a half since he had touched anyone in that way.

In the intervening time, it had become clear to him that his hunger had died with his master. The urge had never come back as anything more than mild curiosity, and even then only once – in a bar in Braxton. Which meant, in all likelihood, that his momentary impulse had been nothing but a glitch. A tiny echo of something that was long gone and would most likely never come back. He never wanted it to come back.

He wondered if perhaps he had seen a little too much of Taki in Haruki in that moment. The thought inspired a sharp twinge of self-disgust and guilt, especially when he imagined Haruki knowing what had flashed across his mind.

Thankfully, before long, it became nothing more than an odd, guilty memory. The following day, all had returned to normal. He caught Haruki’s smile when he came in and felt a familiar paternal warmth.

The thought did cross his mind that morning, however, about whether it was altogether necessary for Kolya to hover so close to Haruki’s shoulder for the entire duration of the meeting.

* * *

_I hope this letter gets through, Klaus. I’m assuming I made some sort of mistake in posting the last one. I’ll be more diligent this time._

A sunny afternoon about a week later found Klaus sitting on his bed, carefully reading through the latest letter from Claudia.

He had written months ago when the war started and when the threat of a nuclear confrontation didn’t seem out of the question. He told her it was safest to leave the capital, which could be a target, and to wait at the cottage until they heard from him again. It had gotten more and more difficult to communicate with the west - Claudia’s last letter hadn’t made it past the borders of censorship. But the latest was short and didn’t reveal too much.

In it, she hinted that the family was at the cottage and that things were tense but quiet in their neck of the woods. She also expressed her relief and tempered happiness over the brief recounts Klaus had provided of his time at the division.

_You almost sound like yourself again, little brother. If you’re not just putting on airs to mollify your insufferable older sister, I think I owe your commander a debt of gratitude. Take care of him, Klaus. And take care of yourself out there. You’re not as invincible as you think you are._

He smiled softly as he wrote his reply.

It was a sensation like a distant, tinkling bell. Or soft lights in trees. Something faint and bright; simultaneously alien and familiar. But it never lingered long enough for him to focus on it. Effervescent laughter in the infirmary. A jade coat flapping on the border of the west. Thoughts he’d had over the past week that rose up from nothing and dissolved almost immediately.

Perhaps whatever he was feeling simply owed to the weather. It was the middle of the afternoon on the last day of the week, which meant most of the division was on a short break. The compound itself seemed to settle back into the new warmth of the season, trying to shake the memory of winter’s chill. At the centre of the compound, the cherry blossom tree was in its element.

After he dropped off the letter at the postal exchange near the south entrance and made his way back, he had an unexpected visitor. He heard a rapid, familiar scattering of paws behind him and he turned just as Kaiser reached him. His coat shone in the sun and was warm to the touch. Klaus looked around but didn’t see Haruki.

‘Where’s your master?’

A happy, lolling tongue and trusting eyes that didn’t reveal much. It occurred to Klaus that he’d never asked Haruki exactly where and how he had found Kaiser.

For a few paces, Kaiser seemed content to follow Klaus. But before long, Klaus turned to see the dog had taken a sudden right and veered off the path.

Curious, Klaus followed.

A pair of dark birds swooped low nearby and darted off above the trees lining the path, locked in an exuberant courtship. Kaiser trotted ahead, taking his time to sniff the bases of trees, apparently not overly interested in whether or not Klaus was following. After a while, Klaus realised he was being led to the groundskeeper’s quarters; a small, squat room not unlike Klaus’ own, right in the corner of the compound, a short walk from the postal exchange.

The door was partially ajar and Kaiser invited himself in.

Klaus knocked, but it didn’t look like the groundskeeper was in. The interior was cluttered but welcoming. On the table, tools and bits of maintenance equipment were scattered among breakfast dishes. Flower pots lined the sill and there was even a large tree branch propped up against the wall by the narrow bed.

A door on the other side of the room was also open, its edge silhouetted slightly by the sun’s glare.

Klaus walked through the little room, dryly hoping his intrusion would be forgiven by dint of the fact that he was following a dog. He stepped through the door on the other side.

It took him a moment to notice the sharp right angle of the division’s tall brick perimeter. His senses were so taken up by the unanticipated tranquillity of the little space that he forgot he was still within the compound. A few tall, lush trees enclosed the area with foliage that seemed to have jumped the seasonal gun. Yellow and white flowers grew in abundance, some in rows and others sprouting from hedges and bushes. There was the sound of gentle rustling that took him back to the cottage, which he hadn’t seen in six months. That particular illusion was heightened by the wheat stalks that dipped in the breeze.

When Klaus blinked and stepped closer, he realised it wasn’t wheat but a tall, pale, reed-like plant rising from a greener undergrowth. Still, the effect was strikingly similar.

He turned in time to see Kaiser spring up onto a sturdy wooden bench nestled at the base of a tree where the patch of wheat-like grass ended. The dog lay down with his head and paws draped over Haruki’s shin.

The commander was stretched out on the bench, fast asleep. The familiar jade jacket was folded up over the armrest. His shirt had hitched up a little above his belt line near his hip and his thin black tie fell over the side of his chest.

Taking in the unexpected little scene, Klaus approached quietly and stopped before the bench, feeling instantly protective. He had suspected that Haruki had been working himself too hard recently. He wondered why. One of Haruki’s arms was thrown up and curled around his head. His chest rose and fell peacefully.

Strangely, Klaus didn’t feel like he was intruding. Though something told him that this place was Haruki’s little secret, one that perhaps not even Kolya was aware of, Klaus inexplicably felt like he was welcome there. He wondered how often the kid stole away to this corner of the compound when he wanted a few moments’ peace. He could imagine the groundskeeper being only too willing to oblige the young, charming commander.

Klaus sat on the armrest, careful not to disturb him, and watched him for a few moments. It brought him quite vividly to a day eleven years ago when he came into his room at Luckenwalde in the middle of the day and saw Taki asleep in his fatigues above the blankets. He remembered how his stomach had done a strange flip even back then, months before he had opened himself up to the reality of his feelings.

The minutes lengthened. He breathed deeply and stared at the flowers and wheat-like grass, which carried him from Luckenwalde to a different time. Into those seven years he never felt like he deserved. Seven years of peace. He could see it all when he closed his eyes. There was the cottage with its short front gate. The brick wall skirting the rose garden. The stalks swaying gently in tandem with –

With Haruki’s hair.

A flicker of a frown crossed Klaus’ face. Again, it was a thought that seemed to rise slowly from the depths of something. But this time it didn’t dissolve. This time, his mind lingered on that image of Haruki turning around in the stalks.

Haruki, who had found him in the dark and summoned him. Haruki, who laughed often. Haruki in his silky black vest, champagne in hand, his hair glistening and swept back for the occasion, except for those few errant strands. Always those few –

Klaus frowned again.

– those few errant strands of hair. Falling into his eyes.

Haruki, who never failed to smile each time Klaus came into the room.

Haruki, who –

Klaus’ heart pounded suddenly. Like there was something knocking at the back of his mind, trying to inch its way in. Something that had been knocking for weeks. Perhaps even months. He opened his eyes and kept his gaze trained directly ahead. Directly ahead, and nowhere else.

He told himself not to turn his head. He told himself that nothing would make sense if he did. He knew that if he did – if he turned his head and looked down – he would be in a world of confusion that would make everything exponentially worse.

He restrained himself for a good while longer than he expected.

And then he turned and looked down.

He saw the commander’s sleeping face. Peaceful and vulnerable. The strands of hair that fell backwards rather than forwards. The strength of his body. The exposed skin of his hip.

And suddenly, there it was.

After a few more seconds, Klaus dragged his eyes away and stared at the sky imploringly, heart still hammering.

‘Shit,’ he muttered.


	52. A World of Princes and Knights

Haruki’s eyelids twitched. A gentle voice was calling him back to consciousness.

‘Come on, Young Master. The sun’s lugging itself up across the sky so it’s time you lugged your way out of bed. Up with you, now.’

Haruki groaned and rose out of the depths of sleep but kept his eyes closed and his head on the pillow. He lay still and listened to the elderly Ukiyo pottering about, humming and drawing the curtains, just as he had done for the past sixteen years.

‘I’m not sure your father’s in the best mood. It won’t help if you’re late to breakfast.’

This made Haruki’s eyes spring open. He slowly got out of bed while Ukiyo sorted out his clothes for the day.

‘Why’s my father in a bad mood?’ Haruki asked nervously as Ukiyo dressed him before the mirror.

‘Something about the emperor,’ Ukiyo replied, the corners of his eyes creased in concentration as he fit the haori over Haruki’s shoulders. ‘You’ve grown, Young Master. This only barely fits.’

‘What about the emperor?’

‘You know I’m getting too old for politics. Something about a… non-war pact with a western country.’

Haruki sighed. Meiji had only been emperor for two years and already he had pledged half the world, including the west, to peace. As much as he wanted to be pleased by the news, he knew how his conservative father would take it.

‘My, my,’ Ukiyo said, cutting into his thoughts.

‘What?’

‘You’re taller than me now, Young Master.’

Haruki glanced at him in surprise and found Ukiyo was right. The servant who had taken care of him since he was born now stood a fraction of an inch shorter than him.

‘That’s to be expected, after all,’ said Ukiyo warmly. ‘For a boy of sixteen. Your mother would have loved to see you.’

Haruki gave him a small smile. On his way to the dining room, he touched the framed picture of her on the altar in the living room.

* * *

His father didn’t speak much at the start of the meal but Haruki could tell that Ukiyo was right. His face was as impassive as ever but his occasional irate sighs hinted at trouble brewing.

Two years ago, when the war ended and Haruki had returned home, Noboru Yamamoto had welcomed his son with stiff pride. The two medals bestowed on him by Taki Reizen for actions above and beyond the course of duty had been placed carefully on the mantel.

‘This is only the beginning of our nation’s glory,’ his father said, looking at the medals as though they were the light that would shine the way.

But the nation, in Noboru’s eyes, never took those steps towards glory. Despite their victory at the end of the second war, the new emperor seemed content to leave the borders of their nation where they were. There were no calls to expand the empire or to return it to its strength in ancient times.

Knowing it would be futile, and a little dangerous, to challenge his father in any way, Haruki had listened quietly over the years to Noboru’s frustrations and kept his own opinions to himself. That morning, he took advantage of his father’s surly silence to bring up the news that he waited until the last possible minute to divulge.  
  
'Otousan,' he began gingerly.  
  
His father flicked him a glance. A prominent forehead and eyes that drooped downwards slightly at the corners.

‘I've heard back from some of the military academies. And there's… there’s one I've chosen. I have to accept the offer by tomorrow.’  
  
There was a stiff nod of approval from Noboru. Since his return from the division, Haruki had been studying in a young engineer’s program in the capital. Noboru had heard from teachers about his son’s estimable talents in those pursuits. But such praise always glanced off Yamamoto Senior, who was anxious for his son to carry on his family's proud military legacy.  
  
'It's a flight school,' Haruki said. Then he hesitated, eyes on his breakfast. 'In the west.'  
  
Noboru lifted his chin slowly.

Haruki took a breath and quietly delivered the speech he had prepared over the past week. The prestige of the flight school; how it was esteemed all over the world. How he had gotten through on a full scholarship. And how, above all, it would allow Haruki to understand more about the ways of the west in case there was ever another war. How vital that knowledge might be if he was ever called on to fight.

Though he didn't know it, his rationale almost exactly echoed that of Taki Reizen’s on the eve of his own departure to the west.

Haruki didn’t mention to his father that Ryoumei had also been accepted into the same school; Noboru had always looked down on the Fukushima family, as he did on most families whose standing was beneath their own.  
  
In the silence that ensued, Haruki’s entire future seemed to tick away. He thought over his carefully rehearsed words and hoped they had been enough. Like Taki, he had used those words to hide his real reason for wanting to leave. A certain restlessness; an incorporeal drive that neither Taki nor Haruki understood at the time.

And so when Haruki returned to his room after breakfast having been blessed with his father’s approval, he felt as though he had already taken wing.

* * *

Surprisingly, it was Ukiyo who seemed less than enthusiastic about the idea.

‘Are you sure about this, Young Master?’ he asked that evening.

‘Yes!’ Haruki said happily as he flopped back onto the bed. He glanced at Ukiyo where he was slowly unlatching the window to let in the breeze. ‘Why aren’t you? Even Otousan agreed.’

‘That’s why I’m not sure,’ Ukiyo quipped.

Haruki stared. There was an edge to his servant’s tone that he had never heard before. Besides that, it was the first time Ukiyo had said anything against the master of the house.

Before he could say anything, Ukiyo went on, ‘You’ve been doing so well in school. All those wonderful things your teachers said about you. And –' He paused and sighed. 'Your father would do away with me if he heard me speak like this, but it’s such a waste, Young Master. To throw all your talents away for a career in war.’

Haruki hesitated and felt a guilty twinge. He knew there was some truth to what Ukiyo was saying. And yet...

Ukiyo watched him and felt like it was the opportune moment to ask. ‘I was cleaning out one of your old trunks last week,’ he said casually. ‘You nearly gave this poor old man a heart attack.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘When I unfolded one of your shirts, the last thing I expected was for a gun to tumble into my lap.’

Haruki’s cheeks coloured faintly.

‘Oh. I – sorry, Ukiyo. I should have told you about that.’

‘Where did you get such a thing?’

‘It was… a gift.’

‘From whom?’

‘From… someone I met at the division.’ The pause seemed heavy, as though Ukiyo was waiting for clarification. ‘I asked to borrow it so I could learn to… become stronger.’

_Strong enough to never again cower when I am called upon to fight. Strong enough to protect what is dear to me._

‘But then, after everything that happened in No Man’s Land, he let me keep it.’

‘Who’s he?’ Ukiyo asked, keeping his tone light.

‘He’s… Taki-sama’s knight.’

Haruki was sure his blush had deepened but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He also knew there was nothing incriminating in anything he had said.

Ukiyo, however, had known Haruki his entire life. His intuition was uncanny.

‘A westerner?’

‘Yes.’

‘He wouldn’t have anything to do with your decision to race off to the west, would he?’

‘No.’

But Haruki didn’t meet his eye.

‘Hmm.’

Ukiyo lowered himself to the floor by the low table with a sigh that could only be earned by a certain age. Haruki, meanwhile, stared at the ceiling and hoped he had stopped blushing.

It had been two years since he had last seen Klaus von Wolfstadt.

And yet, in all that time, there were a few select scenes that hadn’t eroded in Haruki’s mind even slightly.

The strongest of all were the few minutes he had spent with Klaus at the train station, when the captain had gone out of his way to see Haruki off. His simmering golden eyes, his hands in his coat pockets. His gentle questions about Haruki’s home and family. The way he had so casually called him ‘Little Master’.

The image that followed close behind that was less clear but far more charged. Snow whipped about them in a frenzy and for miles around there was only Haruki, Klaus and Taki taking shelter in a grove of trees. Taki was barely holding onto consciousness but his words had brought Klaus to tears. And before Haruki had the chance to turn away, Klaus had pulled Taki into a kiss. Haruki’s breath had left him before he had even processed what he was seeing. A few moments later, after Klaus handed Haruki the radio and, with a familiar wink, invited Haruki into their unthinkable secret, Haruki had walked away from the bike feeling like his heart was sinking.

He now understood why his heart sank that day.

Though it had happened in a single moment in No Man’s Land, he had needed more time in the aftermath to come to terms with two things. Two equally heavy, equally impossible things.

The first was how he felt about Klaus. He was forced to understand that the feelings which had begun innocently had transformed, over the course of those intense months, into something else.

The second was that Klaus already belonged, and would always belong, to another.

It was a simultaneous strike from the gods. Haruki carried the confusion and implications and shame and guilt inside him like a lead weight during his last few months at the division. Ryoumei had noticed. And in fact, so had Klaus himself. Another memory Haruki often revisited was that sunny afternoon on the Reizen grounds, not long before Klaus was to be re-knighted. He still remembered the words of wisdom that Klaus had imparted.

_Whatever’s eating you, don’t worry about it, okay? If it’s not important, it’ll go away. If it’s something you care enough about, you’ll sort it out somehow, even if it takes years. Trust me on that._

Two years on, he had learned by himself to come to terms with it all, but the occasional little stabs of pain hadn't gone away. He turned to his side on his bed and curled in just a little. He drew comfort from the soft, familiar sounds of Ukiyo slowly folding his clothes on the low table by the wardrobe.   
  
He thought of bright yellow hair and broad shoulders. A height and size and strength that sometimes seemed super-human. He thought of an afternoon in the square when sunlight had gleamed on bare muscles, some bandages splotched with blood, and a laugh that reduced the world to a punchline. He thought of a wide, crooked smile and heavy arms and large hands and guilt squirmed in his stomach. 

He often closed his eyes and wondered what it would be like to be Taki. How happy they must be, all the time.

'Ukiyo,' he said quietly. He hoped there had been enough of a pause between their last conversation and the question he was about to ask.   
  
'Yes?'  
  
'When there's something that you really want... something you think about all the time, no matter how much time passes… but the only thing you know for sure is that you'll never… you know… have it –'

He paused and almost sighed at how pathetic he sounded.

Ukiyo closely observed his young master's voice. The inflections. The care he put into each word. The tightness in his voice that he tried to mask.  
  
'What do you do?' Haruki finished plaintively.  
  
_How do you stop thinking about it?_  
  
He was grateful he was facing away.  
  
Ukiyo weighed his words thoughtfully. ‘You know something my grandfather used to say? He used to say, _Impossible is possible’s favourite disguise.’_

Haruki didn’t understand.

‘Anything can happen, Young Master,’ Ukiyo clarified. ‘Even things that seem impossible at first.’  
  
Haruki almost laughed. He felt another hollow pang. How could he explain such a thing? How could he explain to Ukiyo the singular impossibility, dressed as nothing but impossibility itself, of what he wanted? That he dreamt of things that might as well be happening in another world. A world of princes and knights. A world meant for greater men than him.

'Trust me. That’s – it’s never going to happen.'  
  
'The gods work in mysterious ways.'  
  
'Ukiyo –'  
  
'Alright,' Ukiyo conceded gently, hearing the frustration and hurt in Haruki’s voice.

Ukiyo picked up on it again; how much his young master had changed since he returned from his time at the Fifteenth Armoured Division. It was as though he had grown up over the space of that single year. He knew that what had happened in No Man’s Land – the heroism that had earned him his medals – must have had a part to play in it, but he suspected it ran much deeper than that.

He sighed.

‘If you’re sure that whatever it is will always be beyond your reach, and all you want to do is forget…’

Haruki waited.

‘Then you should do everything you can to be worthy of it, even if it will never be yours.’ A small pause. ‘I think that’s the best way to find peace and move on.’

It was only after hearing Ukiyo speak those words that Haruki realised he had already decided to do just that. To strive to be worthy of the world of princes and knights, even if he could never be a part of it.

‘You’re right,’ he said slowly.

‘I always am,’ Ukiyo said blithely as he pushed aside a pile of folded jinbei and moved on to another. ‘Though I wish I weren’t, this time. If you fly too high, you won’t be able to see me on the ground anymore.’

Haruki smiled.

‘I’ll miss you too, you know. When I’m in the west.’ This brought about a soft, disbelieving grunt from his servant. ‘I will!’ he insisted.

‘Why would a bright, talented sixteen-year-old boy worry himself about an ageing old cretin like me?’

Haruki turned onto his stomach to face him. ‘When I was six, you taught me how to pit cherries with chopsticks when Otousan wasn’t looking. And every time he looked, we would both be eating normally again but there were all these cherry pits on the table and he didn’t know where they came from.’

Ukiyo laughed. ‘You remember that?’

‘Yep. See? How could I ever forget you?’

A smile crossed the old servant’s weathered face.

‘You’re just like your mother. She was a saint.’

Then Ukiyo’s smile went away. He thought about Haruki’s parents – the turbulent marriage he had quietly observed over the years before her death – and a few lines creased his forehead.

‘But you must be careful, Young Master,’ he said, his voice slightly different. ‘It seems to be the curse of saints to fall into the hands of devils.’

‘I’m not a saint,’ Haruki countered in slight embarrassment. A damning heat crept up his neck when he thought of all the unsaintly fantasies he had concocted over the past two years.

‘I just want you to be careful. Be careful whom you trust.’

 _Be careful whom you give yourself to,_ Ukiyo wanted to say. He suddenly wanted to bundle him up like he had done when Haruki was an infant and protect him from whatever lay in the west and beyond.

‘I will,’ said Haruki with a smile, who by then was used to Ukiyo’s overprotectiveness.

Ukiyo was happy to note that Haruki’s mood seemed to have lifted.

‘Don’t ever think you’re not worthy, Young Master. Regardless of whether they choose someone who is descended from heaven or a pauper on the streets, the gods will grace whomever they please. You will do wonderful things. I’ve always known it.’

* * *

_The gods will grace whomever they please._

It was the same advice that Taki Reizen himself would give Haruki, years later, in a cottage in the west.

Haruki fell asleep that night with Ukiyo’s soft words echoing in his mind. He thought of the gun in his trunk and the planes he would fly. He didn’t yet know of the tanks he would command or the men he would inspire.

Even though he had come to peace with the fact that the one he wanted would always be beyond his reach, Haruki Yamamoto had his heart set on becoming someone who might, nevertheless, be worthy of him.


	53. From Laughter to Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! Sorry for the long author’s note below.
> 
> Firstly, I just wanted to remind everyone about the whole no-longer-MR-mostly-Dionys-going-rogue thing. I know canon Haruki is meant to be cute and platonic and nothing else haha, but it’s like I couldn’t help where my imagination went when I envisioned this story over a year ago. Like I said in the preface a while back, this is my little experiment on characters and I hope you're bearing with it so far!
> 
> Much love to the amazing people who are reading it despite the blasphemy (AND SOME OF YOU ARE EVEN ENJOYING IT OMG YOU’RE ANGELS, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).
> 
> Secondly, because adult Haruki is such a huge part of the story, I thought I’d throw a few visuals of him your way (including [this one of Taki/Haruki](https://drawingsbydionys.tumblr.com/post/159582928505/taki-haruki-commanders-of-the-fifteenth) that I posted at the bottom of Chapter 43). We're already so well acquainted with visuals of the canon characters that I wanted to give Haruki a bit of face time too. Here's Haruki with his two Mad Dogs.
> 
> From old descriptions: similar to Taki in the eyes/brow line/shape of hair but firmer jaw and wider mouth. Also taller than Taki, though he turned out a bit too tall in the drawing.
> 
> Also Kolya.
> 
> Also 36-year-old Klaus with his scar :)
> 
> Anyway, hope you’ve found something to enjoy in the story! I always love hearing from you guys, and I’m so happy and surprised at the response to Part 3 so far, so thank you, really!!! Xx

The weather was gratingly cheerful as Klaus made his way back to his shed. The mellow springtime sun shining from between pearly clouds seemed to mock the storm-shaped little knot in his stomach. He had completely left the peace of the afternoon behind, along with the gentle happiness he had felt as he wrote his reply to Claudia.

_He’s twelve years younger than you._

The barracks filed past and he reached the officer’s courtyard. He barely noticed when the soldiers he passed saluted him.

_He’s a goddamn kid. What the hell is wrong with you?_

Even stronger than the self-disgust, stronger than any thoughts of Haruki, were thoughts of Taki.

Taki glancing up from the harvest forecasts just in time for Klaus to catch his lips in a kiss.

Taki turning in his sleep, his hair trailing behind him over the pillow, so Klaus could pull him in closer and hold Taki’s head to his chest.

Taki.

Taki.

And the guilt sliced through him like a blade.

How demeaning. How cheapening. How utterly, profoundly unworthy of everything they had shared over eight years for Klaus to harbour even the thinnest sliver of a thought for –

He couldn’t help but feel, beneath it all, a pinprick of resentment towards Haruki himself. It almost felt like he had been worn down over the past six months; like he had been forced to drag himself out of the pit, forced into the light, forced to smile, forced to feel – in fire-lit offices, on moonlit balconies, in the most ephemeral of fragments – happy again. All for Haruki’s sake. All because Haruki had called him.

He never should have come.

* * *

Not long ago, on a bench in the groundskeeper’s quarters, Klaus was thinking about leaving. He could picture himself getting up slowly, walking past the patch of tall, pale, wheat-like grass, and slinking back to his shed where he would try to make sense of his momentary lapse in reason.

He knew, however, even as he reasoned, that it wasn’t momentary. That it had seeped into him in small moments at a time without his knowledge, over the course of months, and he had only then turned around and noticed what it all amounted to.

And, in any case, he had waited too long to make his quiet getaway. On the bench beside him, Haruki took a deep breath, stirred and awoke. Klaus guiltily watched the peaceful, drowsy look in his eyes transform, when he caught sight of Klaus, into one of surprise.

‘Klaus –’

A low, pleasant voice that was made slightly hoarse by sleep. Klaus felt a small, powerful tug of emotion that made him grit his teeth.

‘Hey, kid,’ he managed.

Haruki lifted himself up into a sitting position and ran a hand through his hair, feeling somewhat disoriented. He stared at Klaus sitting on the armrest and couldn't be sure whether he had, in fact, woken up at all.

‘Sorry if I scared you,’ Klaus said.

Haruki wondered if there was something different in his tone. Something both quieter and tenser than usual.

‘You didn’t. But how did you –?’

‘Kaiser blew your secret.’ They both looked at the bench where Kaiser still slept soundly, innocent as ever. ‘Little traitor led me right here. Good thing I wasn’t the _Hitobito_.’

Haruki chuckled.

Over the past few seconds, Klaus had tried to avoid looking at him but, largely, failed.

He had seen and spoken to Haruki almost every day for six months, but he found, in that moment, that he was back in the wheat field on the day that Haruki had arrived at the cottage for the first time. When Klaus, just for a moment, had confused him for someone else.

And so he stared again, like he did that day. Taki in the shape of the eyes, if not the colour or size. Taki in the shape of his hair, if not the colour or texture. Hair that wasn’t as dark and skin that wasn’t as pale, a frame that was larger, wider in the shoulders, and yet –

Gritting his teeth again, Klaus forced himself to look away just before Haruki turned back.

There was a lull in the breeze and it was like the world had stilled for a moment. Then the trees and flowers rustled again.

_I should get going. I’ll leave you to it._

That, or something like that, was all he needed to say. Then he could get up and leave. But the words that came out of his mouth were, ‘Nice little corner you’ve found.’

He tried to tell himself that it was no different to the countless times he and Haruki had sat together in his office at the end of the day.

Haruki sat on the other end of the bench, his right knee propped up and a hand on Kaiser’s fur. He still looked drowsy, hair swept back and a few strands curling down and over his forehead.

‘I’ve always liked it here,’ he agreed. ‘Ryoumei and I found it when we were cadets. We snuck in and got in trouble from Watanabe, but he was nice enough not to tell any of the officers.’

The image of Haruki as a cadet suddenly hit Klaus in full force. That was when he felt the first stab of self-disgust.

‘Watanabe is still the groundskeeper, almost ten years on,’ Haruki continued, unaware. There was a faint smile on his face. ‘It’s sort of reassuring, isn’t it? That some things never change.’

The pale wheat-like grass bent backwards in a choreographed domino effect.

‘Kind of reminds me of the cottage,’ Klaus said.

He was surprised to see Haruki looking a little embarrassed, like he’d been caught.

‘What?’

‘Actually… that plant over there,’ Haruki said, lifting his chin to indicate the wheat-like grass. ‘That’s called maiden grass.* Watanabe had just one patch growing earlier this year but when he found out how much I liked it, he grew a lot more. I told him it reminded me of a cottage I stayed at in the west.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Yeah. I… really liked it there.’

Klaus tried to remember the four days Haruki spent at the cottage. He remembered the place felt lighter than it had been in a long time. He remembered how Taki had smiled softly as he listened to them talk and laugh. He remembered, in a strange little fragment, how Ori had leaped onto Haruki’s lap and nearly made him drop his dinner plate.

Drops of light. Like the dappled sunlight falling through branches into the groundskeeper’s little secret. Or like the lights in trees he envisioned. Nothing overwhelming. Not something that drowned out the darkness; just something to hang onto as he waded through it.

‘You should come back for a visit,’ Klaus heard himself saying. ‘When all of this over, I mean. You’ll brighten the place up.’

Haruki looked at him in surprise and looked away again, his smile slightly embarrassed.

Klaus kicked himself.

_What the hell was that? Pare it back, moron._

He noticed for the first time, and then tried not to look at, the long line of Haruki’s body where he sat low on the bench, his right knee still bent in the air.

Haruki was lost in his own memories, beginning with the day he had stared across the amber fields from the front porch, a few minutes before Klaus invited him to stay, at Taki’s behest. He was remembering how Taki, in that quiet, firm voice of his, had asked Haruki to summon Klaus after he was gone. He thought about the easy friendship he liked to think he and Klaus now shared; enough that the captain was able to sit with him like this in Watanabe’s little corner, talking of happier times. It seemed too good to be true.

Haruki knew that the world, in Klaus’ mind, was divided into two – Taki Reizen, and everyone else. He had always known that, and it didn’t matter. It was enough to be that close, he thought, in an echo of what Klaus himself had said on Feulner’s balcony.

Out of the corner of Klaus’ eye, he noticed Haruki’s vacant gaze. He watched him yawn and rub the back of his neck. He remembered a late night in Haruki’s office he had interrupted a month ago.

‘Getting enough sleep? You seem tired these days.'  
  
Haruki smiled. 'Kolya asked me the same thing this morning.'

Kolya.

Another image rushed Klaus; Haruki folding sleepily against Kolya’s body in the morning light.

It was a question Klaus hadn’t been able to ask in the past six months and now it surfaced with a new, bitter aftertaste.

'I have been having a few late nights,’ Haruki admitted. ‘But only because I’m trying to stay ahead.'  
  
Klaus tried to expel the image from his mind. He focused on what Haruki had said.

'Stay ahead?'  
  
'It's been almost six months since we heard from Shoda.’ He threw Klaus a serious glance. ‘Do you know what the capital’s saying about him?'  
  
Klaus nodded.

The Tachibana administration had been encouraging rumours that the leader of the _Hitobito_ was dead and that the revolution was over.  
  
‘I think he’s still out there,’ Haruki said resolutely. ‘I think the _Hitobito_ is stronger than ever. I've been staying up trying to look over their old strikes, trying to figure out what they might be up to next. I don’t have much evidence to support any of this, but it’s like all the little brushes that the police have had with possible rebel members are sort of like Shoda’s… testing us. Seeing how much manpower we have. It’s like he’s waiting to strike. And I... want to be ready.'  
  
Klaus thought he heard beneath the words themselves a thin layer of self-doubt.

‘We’ve been training regularly. The men are as ready as they can be. There’s only so much more you can do with what you have, kid.’

‘I know, but…’ Haruki hesitated. He tried to explain something that he hadn’t been able to explain properly to Kolya. Something he had worried about since the first murmurings of war over a year ago. ‘Most of the men here remember the last war. A lot of them fought in the last war. They remember how we won. They – they remember…’

He trailed off.

‘Taki,’ Klaus surmised.

Their eyes met.

Haruki knew by then not to bring up Taki’s name unless Klaus did so first. Feeling guilty and relieved, he nodded once before turning to watch Kaiser’s fur riffle between his fingers.

‘I know all the men see something of Taki-sama in me,’ he said quietly. ‘I know that’s probably why I was vetted and chosen by headquarters in the first place. So I’m… I want to be ready all the time, and strong all the time, like Taki-sama was.’ He paused. ‘I don’t want my men to look for him in me and be disappointed.’

Klaus swallowed and averted his gaze. At any other point in the past six months, Haruki’s words wouldn’t have had the effect on him that they did now. The guilt came to him in a fresh wave.

He mulled it over before speaking.

‘You know,’ he began slowly. ‘Taki never let anyone see it, and I had to be looking really fucking close to notice, but… he doubted himself at times during the war, same as you. He wasn’t always strong.’

Haruki seemed doubtful. ‘I can’t imagine him being weak in any way.’

The memory that came to Klaus made him smile. He moved off the armrest and onto the bench.

‘On Taki’s first day at Luckenwalde, he went in to see the Brass. In his fatigues.’

‘Fatigues?’ Haruki echoed, a little shocked. Having been in the west and in Luckenwalde himself, he knew the strictness of the dress code there when facing officers.

Klaus chuckled. ‘Turns out one of our comrades had decided to play a trick on the new guy. Anyway, when I found Taki again, he was in our room. And he was curled up in a ball under the sheets, from head to toe.’

Haruki was confused. ‘Curled up in a –?’

‘Yep. He was so humiliated he threw the sheets over himself and didn’t move a muscle for a long time. He looked like a goddamn strudel.’

Even though Haruki laughed, Klaus could tell he had a hard time believing it.

‘That… doesn’t sound like Taki-sama.’

‘It doesn’t, does it?’ Klaus said with a grin. He remembered how he had finally coaxed the young prince out of his cocoon.

_Let’s start over. It’s nice to meet you, Taki._

‘And yet, that was the man who led us all to victory in the last war.’ He looked at Haruki. ‘We’re all allowed to have moments of weakness. Even the commanders among us.’

Haruki lifted his gaze.

‘You’re doing just fine, kid. Better than fine.’

The words didn’t sound as strong or emphatic as Klaus wanted them to. He had more to say. He wanted to say that Taki had been somewhere above it all and that divinity was his strength, but that Haruki was closer to the ground, where his soldiers were, and that was Haruki’s strength. But suddenly Klaus couldn’t bring himself to say more; to compare them so bluntly. In any case, what he did say seemed to resonate with Haruki anyway.

When Haruki’s warm, grateful expression inspired another tug of guilt, Klaus let out an exhale and got to his feet. He feigned tiredness and ignored Haruki’s quiet protests that he didn’t have to leave.

As he left that little sliver of tranquillity behind, he also ignored the small, treacherous voice in his head that wanted him to have a quick final glance over his shoulder.

* * *

That feeling – the one that resembled small, tinkling lights – evaporated soon after he left. By the time he reached his shed, he caved completely to the self-loathing that had only shown up in snatches when he had been sitting with Haruki.

He pushed aside the indiscretions of that afternoon, however small they were, by filling his mind with thoughts of Taki. Eyes that made him feel small. Pale skin beneath the devil’s peak of shining obsidian hair. A small, lithe form that trembled beneath his fingers.

And a still body that he held in the blue light of dawn.

When he closed the door of his shed, he almost welcomed the familiar ink-stain that spread from the centre of his chest, like an old friend, on the heels of the thought of Taki’s pale, lifeless face. It was the darkness he had resigned himself to for the rest of his life. A place where distant, tinkling lights and the gentle swaying of pale, wheat-like grass and fire-lit offices and moonlit balconies stood no chance.

* * *

_WEEKS LATER_

Klaus felt like he didn’t mentally leave his shed since that day.

Physically, he still went to meetings and drills and even hand-to-hand training sessions (though he didn’t spar with Haruki again, blaming his little urge during their last spar for having triggered everything else). But his mind was longing for the safety of his own space where he wasn’t in any danger of letting this new inner turmoil break the surface.

It was mid-afternoon and he knew there was a training session he was missing out in the square. He lay in bed, trying hard to uphold his promise to Haruki that he wouldn’t reach for the black satchel, which the young commander, in his good faith, hadn’t confiscated.

He tried not to picture Haruki in his kendogi absently twirling his shinai, oozing strength and vitality in the way of the young, soundly defeating each of his soldiers, patiently improving their techniques, helping them back onto their feet with a smile. The back of Klaus’ teeth had begun to ache from how often he clenched his jaw.

He hadn't spoken to Taki in weeks. He couldn't bring himself to face him.

Intimacy had been unappealing over the past year and a half in homage to Taki. It was a resigned coldness he almost embraced. And now his body was turning on him.

In almost every way, he was reminded of feelings he had faced once before, and failed to subdue, almost twelve years ago in Luckenwalde. First, he waited for his wayward thoughts to simply go away.

Just like the first time, they didn’t.

Just like the first time, to his dismay, the thoughts only came at him in stronger surges. It flickered again – the hunger he thought had died with Taki – and rose through his body. It morphed and twisted like a new lifeform into things he had no control over.

Images of Haruki lying beneath him, his face turned away but his eyes still on Klaus, his mouth covered by a hand, moaning and flushed and –  
  
Klaus slammed his fist against the bedframe.  
  
He sometimes awoke in a similar predicament, where he was stiff and sweating and images of Haruki and Taki would combine in an unholy mess and he would be left to hate himself in fresh shades. He had landed squarely in it; in the world of confusion he had predicted when he sat beside a sleeping Haruki in that little corner of the compound.

Over the past few weeks, when those thoughts refused to ebb, when they instead grew stronger, he began to rationalise.

He was misunderstanding his own feelings. He was, quite simply, mistaking Haruki for Taki. This was nothing more than a perverted manifestation of his grief. Of how much he still longed and loved. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that they looked similar enough to be brothers, that they occupied the same post at the same division and sometimes even shared that same fierce, faraway look in their gazes at the outset of battle.

And yet, Klaus’ rationales stopped short when he couldn’t explain why their points of distinction struck him almost as strongly as everything else. How quick Haruki was to smile. How forthcoming with his trust and his words. His generosity and gratitude. He was warm where Taki had been –

_Stop it. Shut up._

Besides all that, there was something else, at the root of it, that was fundamentally different from his feelings for Taki.

When he first met that nine-year-old boy beneath the wisteria tree, the boy with the spellbinding eyes, and when he saw Taki again ten years later in Luckenwalde, and when he sat beside Taki in their room and kissed him for the first time, he felt something outside of his own body. He felt that pull of destiny. Something that was external as much as it was internal.

It wasn’t there now. That sense of destiny. Here, it wasn’t ethereal. Here, now, the feeling was more… raw. More real. Less –

_Shut up!_

Tired of hearing his own voice in his head, one that veered mercilessly between treachery and self-loathing, Klaus got out of bed and returned with a bottle of scotch. He talked himself through the necessary steps for self-restraint, took a few mouthfuls, and tossed it back into his suitcase from where he was. He sighed and stared at the ceiling.

‘You’re a fucking joke, Wolfstadt,’ he murmured.

On top of everything else, his feelings about Private First Class Kolya di Lupo had resolved into simple, barbed jealousy. He watched the way he and Haruki seemed to communicate effortlessly, with looks and gestures even more so than words. He would battle images of them together, locked together, locked in their mysterious past together, and he realised that he had cast himself in their private world as Hans Regenwalde.

At that, Klaus allowed a dark little chuckle to escape him. It was part-resignation and part-nod to the gods for their warped and cruel sense of humour.

None of it mattered.

None of it mattered. This was just a brand new perversion that Klaus would have to ride out in silence. There was the war. There was Kolya di Lupo. There was the way Haruki would react if he ever, gods forbid, came to know what Klaus was thinking.

_Have you no shame?_

Words Taki had spoken in that very shed, on that terrible afternoon when Klaus’ hunger had consumed him.

_That boy admires you so much. And you betray him with this… depravity._

Though Taki couldn’t have known how his words would resonate ten years later, his prescience was nothing short of astounding. Klaus sighed in frustration.

None of it mattered, he reminded himself as the scotch slowly warmed him up. It was just a brand new perversion that he would have to ride out in silence. And solitude. In total silence and total –

There was a knock on the door.

‘Klaus?’

_Fuck._

Klaus squeezed his eyes shut and counted to three. ‘What’s up, kid?’

‘Can I come in?’

The last time someone had asked him that, it was Ryoumei standing on the front porch of his cottage. He wondered if he should simply have slammed the door in Ryoumei's face.

His first instinct was to make an excuse. But he realised the commander had probably noticed his distance over the past few weeks. And probably made the wrong assumptions. Old habits.

‘Sure,’ he said tiredly. He sat up a little straighter.

The door opened. Kaiser bounded in ahead of his master, as usual. No matter how much Haruki had tried rebuking him, the dog always ended up on Klaus' bed, tail wagging, and always managed to raise Klaus' spirits, even if only by a fraction.

Klaus looked up and saw Kolya's outline some way in the distance beyond Haruki. He felt a familiar, pointless swirl of annoyance.  
  
And then he focused on Haruki himself, who had apparently stopped in on his way back from the auditorium. The young commander was still in his kendogi, his face bearing some of the afterglow of combat.

Haruki, meanwhile, was greatly relieved to see Klaus’ gaze was focused and steady, unlike the day he had seen him under the effects of morphine. There was, however, still something guarded about Klaus. His face and his posture. Something Haruki had noticed over the weeks.

He tried not to let it upset him.

‘Sorry to – interrupt,’ he began uncertainly.

‘I wasn’t doing much.’

‘It’s just that… Sen mentioned to me that you seemed a little off this morning.’

‘Who’s Sen?’

‘She’s the maid who brings the officers their meals.’

‘Geez, kid.’ A small smile of affection. ‘Do you know the names of everyone in the compound?’

His eyes lingered on Haruki’s mouth and jaw. Different to Taki’s. Less delicate. Still beautiful –

He sighed and cut to the chase, if only to get Haruki out of his shed faster. ‘I’m not using again, Commander, if that’s why you’re here.’

Haruki hesitated.

Klaus indicated his forearm wryly. ‘Want to check?’

‘No, I – I believe you. I was worried maybe you were sick or something.’

‘Just tired. I’ll sleep it off in time for the drill tomorrow.’

‘Okay.’

‘And I’ll be sure to put on a huge smile for Sen when I see her in the morning. Not my fault if that scares her, though.’

Haruki’s surprised laugh made a few distant lights blink on, just for a few seconds, before they were lost in the darkness again.

* * *

After he left, Klaus let out an irate exhale he didn’t know he had been holding in. He hated how much he revelled in the commander’s smiles and especially his laughter and realised he made stupid jokes, as far back as when Haruki arrived at the cottage, just so he could hear it. He even felt a strange, bitter satisfaction when it occurred to him that Kolya never brought that side out of him.

There was a light that came from Haruki, one that, whether divine or not, he could see clearly, and one his men could see clearly. He could tell that almost everyone was touched by it. It had been strong enough, after all, for Kolya to leave the darkness of his past behind in Eurote. Enough for Ryoumei to come all the way to the west on Haruki’s behalf. Enough for an entire division of men to continue to have hope even in the midst of a war on two fronts.

Once, a few months back, Klaus had asked Haruki a question in passing, after recalling a conversation about name derivations he had once had with Taki.

Waterfall.

The people’s victory.

And –

‘Oh, it means something like _the light that shines_ ,’ Haruki replied a little self-consciously. ‘My mother chose it,’ he added with a soft smile that Klaus hadn’t seen before.

Despite the mouthfuls of scotch, Klaus was still being tossed from one memory to another. From laughter to light to name derivations to an old friend talking to him gently in a terrible dream.

 _You trample all things divine_. _Like you were sent to them just so you can tear them down._

_You killed your rose. Just like you’ll kill your pup._

And the back of Klaus’ teeth ached again.

Even if he put aside all the things that mattered – including the war and Kolya and the perversion of Klaus’ feelings themselves, even Taki – Klaus was still certain of one thing when he watched Haruki scale the side of Murakumo at the start of their drill the next day and smile before he ducked out of sight.

Haruki's light was one he didn't deserve. And he wouldn't be the one to put it out.

* * *

More victories on the Western Front, and no hint yet of either side resorting to nuclear weapons, had the newspapers teeming with overly patriotic sentiment. Newspapers which, no doubt, were controlled almost exclusively by Tachibana.

Haruki scanned the pages with his lips set in a firm line. It was clear, through the bursts of rhetoric in headlines and subheads, where it was all heading. An empire that extended in all directions. A fool’s hope. But one that men like Tachibana had dreamt of for decades and needed only the excuse of another war to see it happen.

And it was rhetoric that Haruki was familiar with. He had heard it countless times from his own father.

_Lesser nations than ours have done it before. We may be small, but we are more than capable of commanding an empire. It’s the glory we deserve. The glory we were always destined for._

When Haruki was old enough, the rebuttal – several rebuttals – had lined up on his tongue. Other nations may have done it before, Otousan, he would say quietly. But they all lost their empires one by one. Each and every one of them. Should we not learn from that?

But Haruki had never once been able to stand up to his father.

And neither he nor millions of others in his nation had been able to stand up to their emperor.

Kolya, who was alone with Haruki in the office, knew there was something weighing on Haruki’s mind even more than the state of world affairs. He suspected what it was, though he had yet to muster the courage to ask Haruki about it.

Haruki had tried, as much as possible, not to be disproportionately upset by Klaus’ distance over the past few weeks. The captain had shown up to briefings and drills but rarely to any of their hand-to-hand training sessions and he never stayed behind in Haruki’s office or after briefings like he used to. Haruki took him at his word that he wasn’t using again. He always seemed to be of sound mind whenever Haruki saw him, if more detached than usual.

Though he could never tell what Klaus was thinking, or the kinds of demons he was grappling with in his solitude, Haruki knew it was the lingering effects of a loss so profound it would define Klaus for the rest of his life. And so Haruki could only hope from afar that Klaus would know how to emerge from this latest plunge like he did the last time.

Mostly, he was guiltily, and selfishly, upset that his newfound friendship with the captain had suffered as a consequence.

He was almost relieved when Aizawa entered and pulled him from his thoughts.

‘Commander,’ Aizawa said crisply, his clipboard in hand. ‘General Nakamori is here, sir.’

Haruki’s brow furrowed very slightly. ‘I wasn’t aware he was coming today.’

‘I’m sure I put it in your schedule for you, sir,’ Aizawa said smoothly.

Haruki looked at him evenly. He was just as sure that Aizawa hadn’t.

Whatever the case, the general himself strode through the doors, bulging a little at the seams of his uniform. He was accompanied by two black-and-mauve clad members of a new branch of Imperial Guard that Tachibana had introduced.

The ones who made people disappear.

Kaiser’s low growl was audible until Haruki quietened him with a hand on the scruff of his neck.

Kolya, who had seen his fair share of secret police back in Eurote, took a step closer to Haruki so he stood beside his chair and not behind it. Haruki spared him a sideways glance before turning to Nakamori, who sat before his desk without being invited.

‘I’ll get straight to the point, Commander,’ said Nakamori, his tone blunt and unforgiving. ‘We’ve just received reports about an incident that has taken far too long to come to our attention. Apparently, two months ago, you showed a great deal of leniency to the enemy.’

‘Leniency?’ Haruki’s face remained impassive. ‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to, General.’

‘I’m referring to the strike you led against one of the defence outposts on the Western Front. They say you took up our own resources to ensure that something like fifty of the enemy’s wounded soldiers were returned across battle lines.’

‘Actually, it was more like sixty,’ Haruki corrected without skipping a beat. ‘We had the jeeps and the manpower. The enemy had surrendered completely. I didn’t see any point in taking POWs when our victory was so decisive.’

Nakamori had seen the commander’s calm-faced insubordination in the war room but it did nothing to placate him.

‘I’m not sure what game you think you’re playing, Yamamoto, but the emperor isn’t amused. You and your entire division are already on thin ice as far as the capital is concerned.’

‘To be honest, General, I’m not entirely sure about the capital’s prerogatives anymore.’

Aizawa pursed his lips. Nakamori’s expression hardened over sagging jowls.

‘What exactly are you insinuating?’

‘Just that I find it strange that the capital would ignore my missives about a possible impending _Hitobito_ strike but that they’d send you, personally, to deal with a months-old matter of POWs.’

‘It’s not your job to question the capital’s priorities, Commander. Your behaviour over the past few months have been a hair’s breadth away from –’

‘Sorry I’m late.’

Klaus strolled into the office without any preamble.

It was the first of two interruptions that would take place in Haruki’s office that afternoon, both within minutes of one another.

‘Hot as balls outside,’ Klaus declared as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He glanced up at the party assembled before Haruki’s desk. ‘Hey, General. Didn’t realise you were here.’

In fact, he knew full well. When he spied Nakamori going up the steps of the building flanked by the two tall black-suited imperial guards, Klaus’ hackles had raised just slightly. Despite knowing how important it was that he kept Haruki at arm’s length, he crossed the square and followed discreetly behind the small, ominous procession from the capital.

He stepped between the pair of imperial guards, who remained standing, faces set, and sprawled himself liberally in the chair beside the General’s. He glanced at Haruki, who seemed unruffled by Nakamori’s presence but vaguely pleased and surprised to see Klaus.

As he sat down, Klaus threw him the subtlest of winks.

Haruki felt a rush of warm relief.

‘I’m in a private meeting with the commander,’ Nakamori began, a familiar anger growing at Klaus’ crassness and irreverence and his deigning to sit beside him.

‘The captain is part of my counsel,’ Haruki said. ‘I wouldn’t mind if he weighed in on the issue.’

‘Which is what, by the way?’ Klaus said.

‘The capital thinks I’ve shown too much leniency to our enemies on the Western Front.’

‘Oh, you mean when you returned wounded soldiers to their own army? Yeah, I saw that,’ Klaus confirmed lightly to Nakamori. ‘Probably one of the most decent things I’ve ever seen in wartime. And decency is hard to come by in war.’

Haruki gave him a swift, grateful smile in return.

‘Troop size is the only way that the western nations outrank us,’ Nakamori said, his gaze fixed on Haruki. ‘Returning their soldiers helps them strengthen that advantage.’

‘General –’

‘This is only the latest matter to come to our attention. There’s been a trend. The company you keep –’ Nakamori said with an unsubtle glance to his right. ‘Including that fool Feulner. Your time spent studying in the west –’

‘None of that has any –’

‘This is wartime, Commander. You know that any hint of sympathising with the enemy is seen by headquarters and the capital as treasonous.’

The word rang aloud in the office. It seemed to take the shape of the two black-clad members of the Imperial Guard.

Klaus and Kolya exchanged a fleeting look that was almost instinctive. Despite the fact that they hadn’t once warmed to one another over the months, their glance communicated the same thought. If it looked like the commander was about to be escorted out of there by Tachibana’s secret police, neither he nor Kolya would hesitate to draw guns.

‘Is that why you’re here personally, General?’ Haruki said, glad his voice sounded measured even as his pulse picked up. He drew strength from Kolya at his right and Klaus in front of him whose posture remained relaxed even as his eyes glinted.

‘Consider this a warning,’ Nakamori replied stiffly. ‘I won’t abide any more indiscretions. Is that perfectly clear?’

Before Haruki could respond, the office saw its second interruption of the afternoon, this time in the form an anxious-looking sergeant who knocked and entered without awaiting permission.

‘Haruki-sama,’ he said. He saluted stiffly before approaching with a telegram.

‘Control your men, Yamamoto!’ Nakamori snapped irritably.

‘They’re attacking, sir,’ the sergeant said to Haruki without even sparing a glance at the general.

‘Who is?’

‘The _Hitobito_ , sir.’

‘Where?’

The sergeant drew alongside him and handed him the telegram.

‘Everywhere.’

* * *

It was the attack that Haruki had suspected and dreaded.

The capital was under rebel attack for the first time, as were half a dozen other major cities, including the nearby Hokane.

From the brief reports in the telegram, Haruki pieced it together slowly. They had waited. They had waited for the war with the west to take up the nation’s attention and resources. And they struck when the home front was weak.

The Fifteenth was down to around a third of their full strength. So were each of the other divisions. And with an attack of this scale…

A black drop of foreboding fell in the pit of Haruki’s stomach.

The news about the attack on the capital had sent a pale-faced general from the office, along with his black-clad guards. His car tore out of the compound just as Haruki reached the square. The siren sounded across the division.

Kolya walked briskly beside him. Another sergeant from the telegram room arrived with the latest reports.

‘They’ve overpowered the police in Hokane, sir. They’re about to take control of the city.’

And then the thought came to Haruki like a whisper.

 _Let them._  
  
Haruki blinked down at the telegrams, confused by his own thought. Let them?  
  
_Let them take control of Hokane. Let Tachibana know that his rule is being threatened. Let them take –_  
  
And then he looked around at the men who waited for his order. Men whose futures at the hands of the emperor would be more than dire if Haruki even considered going through with a thought as treasonous as the one he had just had.  
  
'Move out,' he said, turning to his sergeant. 'All units deployed to Hokane, tank and infantry. Spare only the ones in the infirmary.'

‘Are the cadets to be used as reserves, sir?’

‘No,’ Haruki said decisively, recalling Taki’s order in the middle of the second war. ‘Leave them with their commanding officer. They’re to be evacuated if the division looks like it’s about to be breached.’

‘Yes, sir.’  
  
Haruki left Kaiser in the square and the dog sat obediently but with a restlessness Haruki hadn't seen in him before. It was as though he was fighting the urge to disobey.  
  
_You and me both,_ Haruki thought.  
  
Though he looked like he was ready to follow Haruki through the square and settle by his master's feet in Murakumo, Kaiser stayed. Haruki hoped he would see the dog again.  
  
Somewhere behind the siren and the clamour of soldiers rushing to their posts, he thought he heard the sound of a motorbike tearing out of the compound. Kolya saw the way Haruki’s head turned to follow the sound.  
  
'I'll go on ahead,' Klaus had said a few minutes earlier, before turning towards his shed where his bike was parked. 'I doubt the _Hitobito's_ gotten its hands on anti-tank missiles, but if they have, I'll clear the way for you.'  
  
Looking up at him, Haruki felt a sudden, powerful tightness in his chest. He had never felt it so strongly before, not even when they blazed their way through the Western Front a month ago. He only just managed to stop himself from taking Klaus' sleeve. He suddenly wanted to order him to stay behind with Kaiser, where he would be safe.  
  
Klaus saw the look on Haruki’s face and stopped. He felt again that frustrating surge of emotion over the way Haruki looked at him. Deep, soulful brown eyes. He vividly remembered his urge to lean down and kiss him; the feeling that came from his body and paid no mind to anything else. He was aware, in the corner of his mind, that Kolya was only a few paces away.  
  
'Be careful,' Haruki said tensely.  
  
Though Klaus' pulse was racing for more reasons than their impending clash with the _Hitobito_ , he managed a reassuring half-smile and wink before he turned. The smile he got in return was one he carried with him as he mounted his bike.

* * *

Klaus saw the direness of the situation as soon as he crossed into Hokane.

Broken glass in shop fronts, bricks from half-collapsed buildings, and the grisly sight of a body or two, sometimes police, other times a rebel, lying on the sidewalk. Civilians straggled by, some trying to reach home, most trying to leave the city.

Hokane was a prominent port city only a few hours away from the capital. Securing it would be a momentous victory for the _Hitobito._ And with so few tanks and men left, Klaus wondered whether they could really hold the rebels back.

A strange winged anger came to him when he saw the angular arch of a large, orange tori lying broken and splintered across the steps to a shrine. He realised then that it had been seven months since his return to the east and he hadn’t once visited the shrine near the Reizen grounds where the other half of Taki’s ashes had been laid to rest.

He decided then and there, as he heard distant booms and gunfire, that it would be the first thing he'd do after the battle was over.

* * *

By the time the tanks rolled into the main street, Klaus had zipped past several startled groups of _Hitobito_ members dressed in camouflage and wearing shabby, old-issue army helmets. They only raised their guns in time to watch him zip past.

He had to weave out of the way when a few shots were fired from rooftops.

And a few times he had sent grenades soaring to send them scattering. He knew quite a few lay dead by his hand and hoped civilians didn’t number among them.

‘Haruki, are you reading me?’

‘Yes,’ Haruki answered from Murakumo, relieved to hear his voice.

‘Go east on the main road, I’ve just been that way. They’ve got machine guns, mustard gas and grenades but no anti-tank missiles. There’s fighting in the eastern quarter that the rebels are winning. Hopefully Murakumo will turn the tide.’

‘Roger that.’

Klaus remembered, out of nowhere, how Haruki had looked sleeping on the bench in his little corner of the compound. He remembered the cadet who had climbed a tree outside his prison cell to ask him if he was alright, in a time when he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked him that.

_Be careful, kid._

The thought was suddenly urgent. He almost sent it through the radio before he realised how it would spike unnecessary anxiety. He imagined the atmosphere in Murakumo, with Moriya, Azusa and Date manning their posts. And Kolya, who had trained as a second-gunner in order to fulfil his role as the commander’s bodyguard. He would be in the hull only inches away from Haruki. It inspired a strange mix of jealousy and reassurance.

Then he remembered that his own gun was holstered by Haruki’s side.

 _We’re all with him,_ he realised. _We’ve trained for this. The kid’ll be fine._

He rolled his bike to a stop around the corner from the eastern quarter. The police were maintaining a barricade around the mayor’s building and the rebels were firing and slowly attempting to get through. The hiss of mustard gas canisters, the patter of gunfire, the warnings shouted through loudspeakers, the occasional grenade explosions. All deafening.

All familiar. All feelings that Klaus knew as though they were etched into his skin.

He was a creature of war. He always would be. His seven years of peace – the cottage bounded by golden fields – was a life that was never his to begin with.

Despair and excitement and adrenaline and resignation melded into one as he gunned his bike head-on into the conflict, his gun drawn and his eyes flashing behind goggles.

* * *

The black drop of foreboding that Haruki felt upon hearing about the _Hitobito’s_ coordinated attacks began to spread slowly as Murakumo trundled towards the eastern quarter.

Every group of rebels they had seen had run for cover, as Haruki had expected. Machine guns and grenades stood no chance against their moving armoured mountain.

But there was something strange about the way they scrambled for cover. Something a bit too precise and specific about their formations. Or the way they relayed instructions over the radio. Like they had been expecting them. Haruki ordered them to keep their eyes peeled for anti-tank missiles, even though he knew Klaus said he hadn’t seen any. The chances of their springing those heavy-weight missiles out of thin air was highly unlikely.

And then, through the vision scopes, something snagged in the corner of Haruki’s vision.

Something high above them.

‘Halt!’ Haruki ordered. It was a command based on instinct.

Murakumo came to a lurching stop. For a few seconds, afterwards, there was silence and darkness in the cramped hull of Murakumo.

‘Sir?’ Azusa said uncertainly.

‘What do you see on the rooftop at our eleven o’clock?’

Haruki kept peering and Azusa joined in using a secondary periscope.

As they watched, several figures on the rooftop clamoured together bearing an object. Something large and top-heavy with an aggressive, bulbous head.

‘Is that –?’ Azusa stammered.

Haruki’s mouth went dry. Not only did it appear to be an anti-tank missile, it was a kind he hadn’t seen before. It was small enough to be shoulder-mounted. And it was being aimed straight for Murakumo.

‘Reverse!’ Haruki yelled. ‘Now! _Now!’_

Murakumo groaned and jolted backwards on its treads. Everyone within was caught in the intertial forward pull.

And yet, there was that sense that it was too late. Haruki knew. He watched as the missile flew from its sheath at a speed that made Murakumo’s retreat look pitiful.

It flew with a high, keening whistle that all five crew members – Haruki, Kolya, Azusa, Date and Moriya – knew would spell Murakumo’s end in a matter of seconds.

Haruki caught Kolya’s gaze and reached for him instinctively right before it hit.

* * *

The sun burned over Hokane.

Klaus felt the sun’s heat almost as oppressively as the lingering effects of mustard gas and the blow back from his own grenades. He was fast running out, but at least his element of surprise had thrown the rebels out of formation.

Just as he reached the safety of a building on the other side of the street, he pulled out the radio again. The one that Haruki himself, Klaus realised with a small grin, had built into the sidecar.

‘Haruki, do you read?’

Silence and static.

‘Kid, you there? Would be great for Murakumo to roll in right about now and flatten these guys.’

Still nothing.

A prickle of worry.

‘Kid?’

‘...read? This...’

There. A flicker of a voice.

The relief it brought about in Klaus betrayed how anxious he had been in that split second.

‘…responding. Say again?’

It wasn’t Haruki.

‘This is Captain Wolfstadt,’ Klaus responded, anxiety mounting again. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Major Nakata with the third infantry unit. Sir, we’ve lost communication with Wolfpup.’

And then the prickle raced over Klaus’ whole body.

‘Maybe they lost their comms,’ he said, reasoning aloud. ‘Do you have a visual on Murakumo?’

‘Negative. We’re heading east towards where they were last seen.’

Klaus gunned the bike around, momentarily forgetting the battle for the mayoral building. He headed back in the direction that he came, ears ringing. Heart pounding irrationally.

Less than a minute later, Nakata hailed him on the radio again.

‘Sir, we have a visual. It’s – it’s gone.’

Klaus frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Murakumo’s been destroyed, sir.’

Ever-present, the talons found him again. They readied themselves around him, ready to clench. But not yet, because the words hadn’t registered.

‘Say again, Major.’

‘We’re under fire, sir. The rebels are on the rooftops…’ A crackle and gunfire and feedback that was indiscernible from the major’s voice. ‘But we have confirmation that Murakumo is destroyed. Anti-tank missile by the looks of it. No sign of any survivors. Requesting backup for our unit, we’re surroun–!’

The radio cut out.

* * *

By the time the bike rolled into the carnage of that stretch of road, the smoke was still billowing everywhere, thick and grey. It blotted out the sun intermittently. It wound into Klaus as he staggered off his bike and into the thick of it, armed only with his gun.

Piercing the grey smoke were the evil yellow streaks of light from rifles and guns perched on rooftops. Picking out the third infantry unit, which was quickly retreating.

And there, in the centre of the cloud of smoke, was the sad husk of Murakumo, charred and dead, barely recognisable as a tank.

_No –_

Klaus ran forwards, tripping over debris, passing bodies wearing the jade of the Fifteenth Armoured Division and bearing the triple-leafed rose, faces open to the sky. None of them Haruki.

The tank loomed ahead. A bullet passed too close for comfort and he barely noticed.

‘Kid…’

 _You’re not cursed, Klaus. You_ are _the curse._

He had told Haruki he’d clear the way. He had told Haruki where to go. He had –

_You killed your rose. Just like you’ll kill your pup._

And the talons squeezed again until what remained in him suffocated. He struggled to breathe as he reached Murakumo. There was no way in. The blast had buckled and welded her closed.

Klaus wheeled about, eyes wild, his breathing laboured. He heard the tinny sound of bullets glancing off Murakumo’s hull and made no move to duck. He scratched his shin against a scalding piece of metal that protruded from Murakumo's track, leaving a deep gouge that he felt only peripherally.

His vision was clouded and there was a ringing in his ears that muted the rest of the world. He walked away from the destroyed tank, all of his senses straining. All of his senses looking for a figure in a jade jacket and dark brown hair somewhere, anywhere.

Nothing. Just smoke and gunfire and bodies.

‘No, please. Please…’

The blue light of dawn. Taki’s lifeless form.

_No, please. Please, God. I can’t, not again –_

He was back in the wheat field and saw Haruki standing a little distance away, staring at the road, his hair and coat swaying in tandem with the stalks. Then Haruki turned and saw him for the first time in eight years.

And hot tears sprang to Klaus’ eyes.

_‘HARUKI!’_

He bellowed Haruki’s name as loudly as he had once bellowed Taki’s in an abandoned farmhouse in No Man’s Land.

And someone answered.

‘Klaus!’

Klaus spun around so fast that he nearly stumbled again. His injured shin oozed blood through his pant leg. The voice was faint, but it sounded like –

And there he was, emerging from a side street in the distance.

Klaus blinked in a daze. He was so far away from Murakumo. It made no sense. Surely it was an apparition. Another of the gods’ cruel tricks. But Klaus' legs moved of his own accord and he was suddenly running. And suddenly he was conscious of the bullets. If he was hit before Klaus reached him…

The distance between them closed. And Klaus’ disbelief threatened to spill over. It was Haruki, alive and whole and almost within reach.

He was saying something but his words were strangely muffled, like Klaus had just been near a shell explosion.

For Haruki, his relief that Klaus was alright was heavily tempered by their precarious situation; out in the open, in smoke that was steadily thinning and would bare them to the gunmen above. He also noticed, as he got closer, that there was a look on Klaus’ face that he hadn’t seen before. A fierceness and focus that would have thrown Haruki if he didn’t have more pressing things on his mind.

‘Klaus,’ he panted when he was within earshot. ‘I need help. Azusa’s been hit. We need to get him out of the –’

But he was cut off mid-sentence; Klaus didn’t stop even when he reached him. Haruki stumbled backwards a step when Klaus suddenly engulfed him, arms enclosing him like a cage and a hand clenching the back of his head.

Haruki’s breath left him.

For a perilous second, they were standing still within range of enemy fire and Haruki was trapped against a body that was as rigid and unmovable as steel. The hand in his hair was tight enough to be painful.

‘Klaus –’

And then that same hand pulled Haruki’s head back. Haruki again glimpsed the wildness and fierceness in Klaus’ eyes in the split-second before Klaus kissed his mouth. He felt mild pain before he understood what was happening. The grip in his hair was still far too tight. And Klaus’ lips had pressed against his so forcefully that his bottom lip was crushed hard and fast against his teeth.

He blinked hard, eyes wide, and made a small, muffled noise of shock.

And then, after only a few seconds that passed with all the slow deliberation of life ages, Klaus pulled back. His grip in Haruki’s hair had eased but he was still holding onto him like he was afraid of what would happen if he let go. His face was still close, still taking up Haruki's entire field of vision, yellow hair framing his eyes.

A few details filtered into Haruki’s steadily numbing mind. How Klaus’ mouth was slightly open and his breathing was unsteady. How there was a hint of something in his golden gaze that tore at Haruki’s heart. He felt sure he had stumbled out of that awful day into a dream from his youth.

It caught up with Haruki then. At least part of it. Enough for him to feel winded. Then he remembered where they were.

‘Klaus,’ he breathed. ‘Az– Azusa…’

Klaus tried to focus. He had surrendered completely to instinct and he felt icy relief coursing through him still and it had all come together into a moment he couldn’t control. The consequences of what he had done seemed vague and distant. Negligible.

But somewhere in the far corner of his mind, he heard what Haruki said. Azusa had been hit.

And so he tried to bring himself back. And he nodded as he released Haruki.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Haruki needed another second before he turned and went back the way he came. He picked his way over debris, trying to keep an eye on the rooftops that loomed through smoke, his lips stinging and his mind reeling.

Klaus followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Maiden grass is a real type of grass that sort of looks like pale wheat stalks. The ‘maiden’ part of the name is just a coincidence that made me blink at the Google results page a few times.
> 
> PS After writing this chapter, it occurred to me that it's sending the following message: if you fall in love with Klaus von Wolfstadt, you should prepare yourself for ten years of unrequitedness and pining. But if Klaus von Wolfstadt develops even the vaguest hint of feelings for you, you should prepare to get mauled by him only a few weeks later, in the middle of a war zone to boot LOL.


	54. Sake and Scotch

As it turned out, Murakumo’s destruction wasn’t spelled out by the first ominous whistling sound, but by the second.

The first missile struck on the tank’s left flank, immediately tearing a hole through the side skirt and part of the track. Haruki felt the blow throughout his entire body. Everyone inside the tank lurched to the left, wondering if that was their final moment.

When it was over, he found that Kolya, whose seat as second gunner was below and to the right of Haruki’s, was gripping Haruki's forearm, and he was gripping Kolya’s. A few charged moments later, when Haruki realised the tank hadn’t suffered a fatal blow, he released Kolya and the tank was kicked back into reverse. Murakumo let out a plaintive groan but trundled.

They could get the tank out of there, Haruki realised as he shouted commands, both to his crew and to other tanks that followed a few streets behind. There was a chance they could get the tank out of there, even with the hit they suffered, even with Murakumo operating at a fraction of its speed. But his instincts were telling him to do something else. He spared only another moment looking at Kolya and Azusa. He thought of Moriya and Date, though he couldn’t see them where they were further inside the tank.

‘Everyone out!’ he ordered suddenly. ‘Evacuate, right now! Move!’

With a quick glance through the periscope, confirming that there was enough smoke from the hit to conceal their evacuation, Haruki opened the hatch. Smoke and sunlight streamed in immediately. He smelled the sharp, metallic wound in Murakumo’s side.

Haruki waited by the hatch until the others had made their way out.

His feet had barely touched the ground before he heard it again; another high whistling sound that grew louder at a terrifying speed.

All five of them sprang for cover in different directions as the missile ripped into the heart of Murakumo and he was lost in a blaze of fire and smoke.

* * *

Haruki and Azusa had scrambled away from the gunfire that started up almost immediately from the rooftops, heading for the safety of the buildings lining the road. Right before they made it past the blown-in windows of a storefront, Azusa caught a bullet in his right thigh and fell to the ground with a loud cry. Haruki dragged him into the store, past broken glass, and they had hunkered as far out of sight as possible.

Around ten minutes later, heart heavy with the loss of Murakumo, praying that Kolya and the rest of the crew had reached safety in time, Haruki hunkered near Azusa who was grunting and exclaiming in pain and wondered how they would make it out. That was when Haruki heard the unmistakeable sound of a motorbike. A sound he could differentiate from all others. He had left Azusa where he was and gone back out onto the street, into smoke and gunfire, in search of Klaus. Minutes later, he heard Klaus shout his name in the distance.

Klaus and Haruki now made their way back to where Haruki had left Azusa. Having regained his senses, all of which were primed, now, to protect Haruki from any further harm, Klaus would pull him behind abandoned cars or simply to the ground and fire at a dark figure on the roof. Once or twice, though he couldn’t say for sure, he thought his shots may have found their mark.

Each time Klaus’ hand closed around his arm, Haruki felt his touch more keenly than he felt the danger of bullets.

Klaus' hands. Klaus' lips...

As they made their way down the street, Haruki, tried to focus on the present, where they were still in very real danger, and not the few surreal seconds that had just passed. Before Murakumo was hit, the Fourteenth Armoured Division had sent word to Haruki that they were en route on the south side of Hokane.

‘Azusa’s in there,’ he told Klaus, pointing at the shopfront a few hundred yards away. ‘We have to get him out and head south. The Fourteenth sent reinforcements.’

Klaus nodded tensely, eyes still on the rooftops.

‘Have you seen Kolya?’ Haruki then asked, his tone caught between hopeful and fearful. ‘Or the others?’

Klaus turned to Haruki then. He saw the look in his eyes. He was briefly perplexed by the thought that he had kissed him only moments ago.

He shook his head and saw Haruki’s face fall.

Kolya.

Taki.

The consequences of what he had done edged in just slightly. Klaus’ stomach lurched. He felt a little sick.

By then, they had finally reached the storefront. Azusa, his face streaked with sweat and pain, seemed both relieved and despondent to see them. Blood gurgled steadily out of the wound that was high up on his thigh.

‘How you holding up?’ Klaus said as he crouched near him. He knew the pain of a bullet wound all too well.

‘Should have… left me here,’ Azusa muttered through gritted teeth.

‘Still might, if you keep talking like that,’ Klaus said. He threw one of Azusa’s arms up around his shoulders as Haruki took his other side. ‘Ready?’ Haruki caught his eye and nodded. ‘Three… two…’

They hobbled slowly out of the storefront, Klaus and Haruki supporting Azusa between them, and tried to find their way out of the smoke and the gunfire.

* * *

The back of Klaus’ neck tingled from being in the open air. Not for the first time, he wished he had eyes on the back of his head. More importantly, he wished there was something flanking Haruki’s other side, the side that was bare to the world. He half-expected a bullet to come ripping through the still-clearing smoke.

He couldn’t tell if the smoke had cleared or if they had hobbled far enough to have outrun it, but either way, the sun eventually streamed down onto the empty, battle-worn streets.

Klaus glanced at Haruki on Azusa’s other side. Thin beads of sweat ran down his face but his gaze, which was fixed straight ahead, was firm and in-control. Until he turned and met Klaus’ gaze and nervousness flashed in his eyes.

Despite the moment itself having been crystal clear, it still came back to Klaus in pockets of memory. This time, he remembered the feel of Haruki’s hair when he clenched it in his hand. The look of pure shock on Haruki’s face when he pulled back.

He tried not to think about it. Not yet.

Then he saw movement in the corner of his eye.

He instinctively stepped away from Azusa, who sagged in the suddenly empty space. Haruki struggled to hold him upright. Klaus went to Haruki’s side just as the rebels, five of them, materialised from the bottom level of one of the buildings, carrying a heavy piece of equipment between them.

In the time it took for the rebels to spot them and reach for their weapons, Klaus had already fired. Of the three shots he took, one of them landed. A rebel fell after emitting a short spurt of blood from the left side of his skull. The other four tried to find cover while drawing their guns.

From behind Klaus, Haruki still held up a great deal of Azusa’s weight and reached for the gun in his holster that had once belonged to Klaus. He tried as best as he could to aim from around Klaus’ body. After firing a few rounds, he saw one of the rebels cry out and sink, clutching his arm.

But there were still three left, and they had taken shelter behind their piece of equipment – a state-of-the-art artillery launcher that the rebels had no business coming by. Klaus could sense them getting into place and getting ready to fire. Klaus, Haruki and Azusa were out in the open.

‘Shit,’ Klaus muttered as his gun clicked empty. He reached for a new cartridge and stepped backwards until he shielded Haruki completely from view.

For a brief moment, he thought of the urgent, fleeting release he had felt when he kissed Haruki and he was suddenly glad he had done something as singularly reckless and irreparable if he was to meet his own death only minutes afterwards.

Before the rebels had a chance to fire, the air was pierced by shots that came from elsewhere. Three clear shots that echoed sharply and left silence behind.

Still on the point of slipping the new cartridge into his gun, Klaus breathed heavily and stared. The rebels behind the artillery launcher lay dead. They had been taken out with the deadly precision of a sniper rifle. And from what Klaus had heard, not a single bullet was wasted.

Emerging from behind the wreck of a car on the other side of the street was Kolya di Lupo, both hands wielding his gun, eyes on the rebels he had just taken down. Then he crossed the street quickly, his face tense.

‘Kolya!’ Haruki said, his voice laden with relief.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Kolya said when he reached him. Anxiety, or a shade of it, had subtly transformed his features. ‘I didn’t know where you were, after we got out. I tried looking for you –’

‘It’s okay,’ Haruki said. ‘You did well.’

Klaus noticed Haruki’s hand on Kolya’s arm, just beneath his shoulder and bit back a surge of jealousy that was somehow both untimely and on cue.

He saw how Kolya hung his head slightly, his repentance somehow taking a real, physical shape before Haruki. It was a feeling Klaus recognised. He had felt it only minutes ago by the charred husk of Murakumo. How much he had failed his commander.

‘I’m sorry, sir –’ Kolya repeated.

‘Have you seen the others?’

‘Moriya and Date got away from the blast. But I lost sight of them after the rebels started firing from the rooftops.’

Kolya made a move as though to lift Azusa off Haruki.

‘No,’ Klaus said. ‘Kid, you stick to Azusa.’ He snapped in the new cartridge and took Azusa’s arm again. ‘Kolya, cover Haruki and watch his nine o’clock and the rooftops. I’ll watch for enemy on the ground.’

Kolya looked at him.

In a paranoid moment, Klaus was sure the Eurotean had the kind of powers with which the gods had graced Hans Regenwalde. That he had taken one look at Klaus and somehow saw what had happened minutes ago.

And so when Kolya complied, after only a brief pause, by covering Haruki's left flank with his gun held at the ready, expression as blank and resolute as ever, Klaus was left feeling ridiculous for his momentary paranoia. He spared another surreptitious look at Haruki before they began making their slow way south again.

Azusa’s breathing was strained and his face contorted from the pain. He looked like he was about to pass out.

‘I should have let you fall off the roof of the train,’ Klaus puffed as they made their way down the sidewalk. ‘Ten years ago, in No Man’s Land, remember? Would have spared us all this fucking trouble.’

Focusing on Klaus’ voice helped Azusa stay with them. He chuckled.

‘And I should… never have… pulled you from that… river,’ he panted weakly.

‘Touché.’

Haruki felt a numb, reluctant smile cross his face as he listened to them.

It vanished as soon as gunshots cracked near his left ear.

They crouched low on impulse, trying to keep Azusa between them. Klaus fought the urge to reach over and pull Haruki fully to the ground. When they glanced up, they discovered it was Kolya who had fired. Two rebels lay dead at the cross-street nearby.

Klaus straightened, again unnerved by the speed and accuracy of Kolya’s aim. He was on the point of reminding Kolya that he was supposed to be keeping his eyes on the rooftops, not the ground, but he stopped when he realised how that would sound.

Besides, he realised with a hint of sourness, it seemed like Kolya had both roof and ground covered. He also noticed that Haruki didn’t seem in any way surprised by Kolya’s uncanny efficiency.

* * *

After the handful of rebels that Kolya took down, they didn’t encounter any more of the _Hitobito_ for a tense fifteen minutes of steady trudging.

Kolya had salvaged a handheld radio from a body of one of the division’s soldiers. Haruki used it to get through to Major Nakata, who had escaped the attack near Murakumo and sounded relieved to hear his commander’s voice. After speaking to him, Haruki tried to connect to each of the commanding officers of the tank and infantry units. Each time he got through, the report was dire.

Sometimes he got only static.

And so, feeling the dread claim him slowly, he gave the retreat order to everyone he could.

In the ominous pause that followed, only their footfalls and Azusa’s soft groans were audible. Klaus watched Haruki out of the corner of his eye. His lips were set tight.

Then, with Azusa still around his shoulder, Haruki switched the radio back on and changed frequencies. After a few seconds, he got through to Commander Ihara, leader of the Fourteenth Armoured Division. He was nearby, as Haruki had hoped.

Ihara warned them that the fighting was heavy where they were and they would be wandering into danger if they got too close. To Haruki’s relief, he said he would dispatch a field ambulance to pick them up en route and get them out of Hokane.

In a strained voice, Ihara also told Haruki that he was very close to ordering the Fourteenth to retreat.

Haruki’s heart sank. They were on the cusp of losing the city.

They had failed.

He thought of the men he had lost; the bodies of the third infantry unit he had passed. The loss of Murakumo.

For some strange reason, the thought of what happened to the tank struck a painful chord in Haruki. The tank that had been Taki’s. It had survived the last war and it had passed through Uemura’s hands to Haruki. And Haruki had let it down.

He had let everyone down.

And Klaus –

Each time he remembered what had happened, he felt part of his mind sink into denial. That moment was fast taking on the quality of something that hadn’t really happened. Only the sheer strength of Klaus’ grip in his hair and the pain in his lip, neither of which Haruki could ever have conjured up by himself, salvaged that moment from a surreal fantasy.

Klaus had kissed him.

Klaus had held him in a suffocating grip, in the middle of combat, and kissed him.

And there was nothing in Haruki’s store of knowledge about the world that helped him understand why; nothing in his understanding of Klaus himself or what he was going through, or Klaus’ distance over the past few weeks, or anything in the past ten years since Haruki had first met him.

The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. 

Whenever he caught the captain’s gaze from around Azusa’s head, he couldn’t be sure what he was seeing. The danger they were still in had taken centre stage and so it was, more often than not, a look of recon; Klaus making sure he was alright and vice versa. But Haruki wondered whether there was something more to it. Whether it was his own imagination that told him Klaus’ golden gaze was burning straight through him.

When the sound of an approaching vehicle grew louder, they ducked into a doorway for cover and Klaus let go of Azusa once more. He and Kolya covered Haruki and Azusa, guns raised, just in time to see a field ambulance careen around the corner.  
  
Haruki recognised the uniforms and insignia.  
  
'It's the Fourteenth,' he told them with immense relief.  
  
Klaus and Kolya lowered their guns. The vehicle pulled up alongside and came to a jolting stop. The driver peered out from beside a lieutenant in the passenger seat carrying rifle and wearing a look of wild-eyed focus.

‘Commander Yamamoto?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Haruki confirmed.

‘We’ve got to go, sir. The _Hitobito’s_ on our tail.’  
  
'Let's move,' Klaus said quickly. He and Haruki brought Azusa to the back of the ambulance. There were already a few soldiers inside, one lying on a stretcher. The young, serious-faced medic helped Azusa on board.

The rumbling of another engine sounded in the distance and grew steadily louder, trailing gunfire and occasional explosions.

After Azusa had been handed to the medic, Klaus, Haruki and Kolya clambered in after him. The ambulance took off before Klaus could pull the doors closed. They clanged open and the fine dust of rubble and debris on the road trailed after them until Klaus finally got a hold of the doors and wrenched them closed.

Haruki realised that he had, for a serious moment, considered staying back after seeing his men safely on the ambulance. He had half a mind to turn and walk towards the oncoming rebels and gunfire armed with only Klaus’ gun. He felt like he ought to stay behind and help the Fourteenth, even if their defeat was imminent, even if it cost him his life. It suddenly felt like the least he should do.

Instead, he turned to the medic and held down the gauze bandage over Azusa’s wound as instructed.

Across from him Klaus sat near the doors, eyes trained out the window. When it looked like they had outrun their pursuers, he turned to watch Haruki crouching by Azusa. The young commander’s eyes were intent again. Sweat and the fine residue of debris laced his face and hair and jacket.

Haruki’s attention was then diverted by the handheld radio, from which Commander Ihara’s voice issued again.

He reported that the rebels had made it into the mayoral building and taken the mayor and other officials hostage.

The _Hitobito no Shori_ had taken Hokane.

* * *

And Hokane turned out to be one of many.

Shoda’s voice sounded clearly through the speakers. It sounded from every radio across the nation. There was nothing the capital could do to stop it.

 _‘Today,’_ he said, his voice sure and clear, almost melodic, _‘will go down in history as one of the most momentous victories in our struggle for peace. The_ Hitobito no Shori _speaks on behalf of all of those who cannot speak, or those who are too afraid to speak. We are here to say that we will not bow to the tyranny of the capital. We will not sit back and let a war-hungry emperor drag our nation through yet another war against the west. We have proved today that we are strong. We have proved today that we are a force to be reckoned with. Hear us now, Tachibana. Your rule will soon come to an end.’_

Aizawa leaned over and snapped the radio off.

In the corner of the general meeting room, the news announcer on the television delivered muted news about the situation at the capital and the various cities that had been under rebel attack. It was nothing the men in the room didn’t already know, so it went unnoticed.

The _Hitobito’s_ coordinated attack was far more extensive than they had first thought. The rebels had struck a total of ten cities and military compounds across the nation, including the capital. Six of these, including Hokane, had fallen to the rebels. The capital had held on by a hair’s breadth.

Haruki sat in his place at the head of the table. Kolya stood behind him. Klaus leaned against the wall. Gathered around the table were the colonels and majors who led each of the infantry and tank units.

Since two-thirds of the division had been deployed to the Western Front, the table had thinned over the past few months. And even less had returned from Hokane.

Haruki’s retreat order had brought back most of the division unharmed. He was relieved to learn that Moriya and Date had escaped without any injuries. Azusa was being treated in the infirmary. But the number of casualties was still far too high. Haruki turned the pages and slowly scanned the list of names.

One of them caught his eye.

Among the dead was Sergeant Ao Ryuuzaki, former cadet and Haruki’s childhood friend, who not long ago had bragged about having barely felt the bullet that had grazed his thigh and goaded Corporal Iwasaki into reading out the letter from his fiancé.

Haruki was suddenly thirteen again, in the summer before they were all sent to the Fifteenth as cadets, and he was joining the others in making light-hearted fun of Ao after his girlfriend broke up with him. Then he was fourteen, making his way through the train after having said goodbye to Klaus on the platform. He entered the compartment where Ryoumei and the others all were. He swung his bag onto the floor and produced the circular steam containers he had snatched from a cart in the officer’s cabin.

 _Ah, this is why we love you Yamamoto,_ Ao had declared as he grabbed one of the dumplings.

Sorrow gripped Haruki’s heart. But none of it showed on his face.

After a small silence, he put aside the report on casualties and looked around at the faces of the men sitting around the table. Defeat settled on them all like a cloak.

Haruki began speaking quietly and confidently. He told them things that he knew had to be said. That they had been struck at their weakest and they did all they could. That they should now focus on sending their reinforcements to the capital to ensure their emperor didn’t fall.

Klaus listened, gravely impressed with how easily Haruki slipped into the role expected of him by the capital.

The question was raised by one of his colonels – how the Hitobito had managed to procure such cutting-edge new weapons. Anti-tank missiles and artillery launchers. Haruki nodded and said he would look into it. He dismissed the table. After the room slowly emptied, Haruki remained standing at the table, gathering together some of his files. Klaus and Kolya remained.

It wasn’t a physical move exactly, but Klaus saw the way Haruki seemed about ready to drop where he stood, as though the pillar of strength he had upheld in front of his men was threatening to buckle. He had seen Taki do the same thing when he thought no one was watching.

‘Kid,’ he said gently. ‘You did everything you could. You saved your crew.’

Haruki didn’t look at him.

‘We trained for this,’ Haruki said to the table, his voice completely removed from the one he had used before the officers. ‘We trained for this. And I still –’

‘We didn’t train for _this_. They were stronger than we thought. There was more of them than anyone knew, they had weapons and resources we never thought they would have. And they waited until we were weak, exactly like you said.’

Haruki still didn’t look up for some time. Klaus felt his heart grow heavier. He wondered how much would remain the same now, after –

And then Haruki glanced up. It was the same look he gave Klaus when they bore Azusa between them and the tumult of combat had gotten in the way. But now, in the peace and silence of the general meeting room, what had happened was there between them, plain as day.

Haruki became aware of Kolya behind him. He turned his head to the side, his heart hammering.

‘Kolya,’ he said softly. ‘Could you give us a minute, please?’

Kolya looked at him in surprise. Haruki had never asked that of him even once, no matter who was in the room. He threw Klaus a sharp glance, which was returned impassively. After the briefest of hesitations, he left.

When the door closed after Kolya, Klaus brought himself to look at Haruki again. He didn't understand the look in Haruki's eyes exactly but it wasn't too far removed from wariness. Perhaps even fear. As though Haruki had had a glimpse of who Klaus really was. It made Klaus loathe himself powerfully.

Ever since they piled into the field ambulance and left Hokane, Klaus had tried to come to terms with what he had done. He knew he had yet again succumbed to a part of himself that had lain dormant for a long time. And, yet again, it had cost him dearly. He had tried to run through all the things he could possibly do or say. All of them ended with the possibility that Haruki would want him to leave. He would leave that question for the young commander to decide.

What was in his power to do was to explain what had happened without giving Haruki the whole truth. To soften the blow. After all, surely by now he had learned something from the many mistakes of his past.

Haruki remained standing before the table, host to the sudden sensation that he was about to feel worse. That something was about to hurt.

'Listen,’ Klaus began, his eyes firmly on the floor. ‘What happened out there, I –' His jaw twitched and he found himself wishing, powerfully, that he was anywhere else in the world but that room. 'I… shouldn't have done that. It was –'  
  
Haruki could feel that his face was flushed again. His pulse rang louder in his ears than Klaus' words. Words that he had, on some level, anticipated.

Klaus slowly pieced together his defence, feeling smaller and viler by the second.  
  
'When you dropped off the radio, and I saw Murakumo was destroyed, I thought –' He finally looked up. 'It all just brought up... bad memories. I wasn't thinking clearly. Hell, I wasn't thinking at all...'

Bad memories.

Haruki's gaze fell away. Of course. Of course it had been about Taki. How was it possible that it took Klaus’ broken words for something so obvious to have occurred to him?  
  
_You're a dead ringer for him, by the way._  
  
A comparison that Haruki had heard many times, from many different people, over the years. And never before had it twisted into him with such force.  
  
'I'm sorry. It didn’t mean a thing, okay?’ Klaus said, as reassuringly as possible. ‘Can we forget about it?'

Didn’t mean a thing.

And there, the hurt that came from nowhere, hurt that Haruki had absolutely no right to feel, began to trickle in from the edges.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki finally said, trying to ignore a sensation that felt like little needlepoints in his skin. He cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, that’s –’

Klaus tried to read his voice. He sounded a little dazed, Klaus decided. But not disgusted. Not fearful. It came close to lifting his spirits.

‘It’s okay,’ Haruki finished. ‘I – I get it.’

Klaus watched him carefully, reluctant to believe him.

‘You sure?’ he said, aware of how ridiculous a question it was.

Haruki nodded.

Klaus waited out the pause, ready for Haruki to gently say that, all the same, it was no longer appropriate for Klaus to remain at the division.

But as the seconds ticked past, he had the sense that they had, somehow, managed to get past the worst of it. And that perhaps the commander still wanted him to stay.

Guilt and relief tussled for prominence. And amazingly, beneath that struggle was an even more insidious one; he was struggling with the sight of Haruki standing in the dim projector light, looking both strong and vulnerable at once, his high cheekbones still dusted with a light flush.

‘Okay, well,’ Klaus said, as he pushed off the wall. ‘You should… get some rest.’ He tried to focus on what would come tomorrow, after the nightmare of that day was over. ‘Headquarters will be breathing down your neck soon. Good move making it clear that we’ll send reinforcements to the capital –’

‘Klaus, your leg.’

Klaus stopped. ‘What?’

Haruki was staring at his shin. ‘You’re bleeding.’

Klaus glanced down at his pant leg. The blood had dried.

‘Not anymore,’ he said. ‘It was just a scratch.’

‘You should get it checked.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

After a few seconds, Haruki gave up. He felt like he had used up all of his strength that day and couldn’t get another word out.

At the door, Klaus felt his new longing tug suddenly at his heart. He was suddenly reluctant to leave the room.

‘Hey,’ he said at length. ‘There’s nothing more you could have done today. Okay?’

A small pause.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki replied.

Again, he didn’t meet Klaus’ gaze.

Kolya stepped back in after Klaus left. He saw what Klaus didn’t. He saw the hurt that finally came through in Haruki’s face. In his posture. It only lasted a few seconds before Haruki gathered himself together again and even managed to give Kolya a small smile, one which Kolya recognised. It was the smile that Haruki put on for others’ sake.

* * *

That night, when Haruki lay in bed, sleep was the furthest thing from his mind. It was an uncomfortably warm night, one that reminded the world of what summer would have in store when it rolled around.

His mind was buzzing with thoughts, each one whirling about in little dark clouds.

He remembered the phone call he made to an airbase in a different province. He asked to be put through to one of the instructors and waited.

‘Captain Fukushima,’ the voice on the other end said abruptly.

‘Ryou, it’s me,’ he said quietly.

‘Shit, Haruki,’ Ryoumei said at once. ‘We were listening to everything that happened. A few of our jets went out to the capital, that’s how we kept the rebels away from the palace and –’ He cut himself off impatiently. ‘Are _you_ okay? Sounds like Hokane got royally screwed.’

‘I’m fine. I called an early retreat. We got most of the men back okay.’

Ryoumei let out a quick, hard breath of relief.

Haruki braced himself.

‘Ryou,’ he said again. ‘Ao… Ao didn’t make it.’

Silence.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Ryoumei muttered, his words barely audible. Haruki could picture him scuffing the back of his head, his permanently angry eyebrows softening a little in shock and grief.

 _I’m sorry,_ Haruki was on the point of saying. Like he ought to have done more to protect Ao.

‘Well,’ Ryoumei said resignedly, after a long pause. ‘That’s the game we’re in.’

Haruki was a little surprised. He mulled over the truth in Ryoumei’s blunt words. It was something he had known since he was a cadet, something every soldier knew, and yet it only hit him properly then.

‘At least that guy made his way through every girl he possibly could before he made an exit. I think that’s all he wanted out of life, anyway.’

Haruki let out a short, reluctant laugh which made Ryoumei smile.

‘I called his parents,’ Haruki said. ‘They want us to come out to see them for a few hours. You and me. Makoto and Toono as well. Next week, if we can spare the time.’

‘Oh, God,’ Ryoumei groaned. ‘You know I’m fucking awful at those kinds of things.’

‘I know. You don’t have to come.’

‘Of course I do. I’m just complaining.’

Haruki smiled again.

‘You holding up okay?’ Ryoumei asked.

Haruki opened his mouth to say that he was.

And then it occurred to him that he could tell Ryoumei what had happened on that smoke-filled street. A moment that had carved itself into the front of his mind. Ryoumei knew, after all. He was the only one who knew of Haruki's feelings, and only because he had figured it out himself a long time ago. But Haruki couldn’t bring himself to go through it - especially not the short, painful conversation with Klaus that had followed.

‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ he said at length. He thought of Ryoumei’s family. His newborn daughter, only a few months old. ‘How’s Sakura?’

‘She’s good,’ Ryoumei said with a smile in his voice. ‘Growing fast. Looks nothing like me, though. She’s all Keiko.’

‘Thank the gods for that.’

‘Fuck off.’

Haruki chuckled.

The memory made him smile faintly as he lay on top of the blankets. He was grateful to have Ryoumei’s friendship, and to have had it for so long. But he knew that Ryoumei could be called out to the Western Front at any time. He knew that anything could happen at any time.

_That’s the game we’re in._

He thought of Ukiyo trying to tell him, long ago, not to throw his life away for something as barbaric and merciless as war. And he thought of the reason why he had gone against that wisdom.

He thought of Klaus’ lips against his for the hundredth time that day. He reached a hand up to his own lips self-consciously. For someone who had always been beyond his reach to have hurtled into him so abruptly like that, with no warnings or overtures…

If Haruki had known – if he had been even the least bit prepared – he would have done more. Even if it was only meant to last for those few seconds when Klaus lost his mind, Haruki would have, guiltily and selfishly, done more. He would have held onto Klaus; his face or his neck or the collar of his jacket. He would have pressed back. He would have –

He turned on his side and tried not to think of how Klaus, in that moment, was asleep alone in his shed.

* * *

_A WEEK LATER_

Klaus could tell how hard the commander had taken the loss of Hokane.

In fact, on the night Haruki struggled to fall asleep, Klaus had also been wide awake outside his shed, blowing cigarette smoke into the warm night air, watching it obscure the moon in the same way the clouds did. He decided then that he would make up for what he did. He would go back to maintaining that distance between himself and Haruki and he would keep an eye on the kid, to make sure he didn’t beat himself up any more than he already had.

On the surface, Haruki was still the reliable, charming commander that this men had grown to trust and admire so much. Though they had never suffered a defeat as badly as the one in Hokane, they were no strangers to loss, and they took Haruki’s words to heart, that this memory of defeat would only strengthen their resolve and ensure their next victory.

Only Klaus and Kolya could sense the difference. They sensed that each of Haruki's smiles was strained. And Klaus couldn’t fail to see how quick Haruki always was to avert his gaze whenever their eyes met. He tried not to dwell on the fact that in one, unthinking moment he had managed to destroy Haruki's trust in him. He had destroyed the admiration of a young cadet who had looked up to him so earnestly for so many years.

Maybe it's better the kid knows, a voice told Klaus, a voice caught between wisdom and bitterness. So he knows to stay away.

He also began to notice that it sometimes took Haruki a moment to respond when one of his colonels wanted his attention in the middle of briefings. Or that he occasionally had to correct himself in the middle of strategy meetings or in phone conferences with the capital. Small mistakes; nothing that anyone else would notice, but mistakes that Klaus had never seen him make before. At times, he was tempted to gently ask Haruki how he was doing.

But he always refrained. He offered his advice whenever the situation called for it but he always stepped away when he wasn’t needed.

And the weight of his single moment of lunacy on that smoke-filled street began to ebb slowly. It was a mark of the commander’s good nature and forgiveness that they had been able to move past something so shocking. It reminded him of the day in No Man’s Land when Haruki had seen Klaus and Taki together on the bike. He had taken their secret on board with a maturity and grace that Klaus didn’t expect of an adult, let alone a fourteen-year-old.

Ryoumei had coined it well.

_No matter how much I tried to beat it out of him over the years, the guy still has a heart of gold. Really goddamn annoying sometimes._

The thought made Klaus smile to himself.

By then, his feelings for Haruki had become a sort of numb constant. They hadn’t receded even slightly but they had become manageable. Enough that he reined in his wayward thoughts with a kind of tired self-contempt.

Though he owed it to Haruki to keep himself in check, there was nothing he could do to curb the wayward thoughts themselves. The most prominent of these took shape during a briefing when he glanced at the long sleeves of Haruki’s jacket and found himself wondering again about his burns. He wondered where they were exactly. How much of Haruki’s skin was marred by it. How they would look if Haruki was laid bare, how they would feel to the touch.

In one of his weaker moments, this time in his shed, he imagined that Haruki was beneath him, back arched, and accidentally let slip a _Klaus-sama._

* * *

He only found out about the death of Ao Ryuuzaki, the sergeant he remembered quite vividly from a bright, happy day at the infirmary, by the time Haruki and Kolya had already left to visit Ao's parents. He wondered if that particular loss explained Haruki’s distractions more than anything else.

He remembered how Taki closed himself up to the world if they ever lost a comrade in Luckenwalde.

 _Today,_ Klaus had said, before dragging Taki to the old man's café where he made him have his first sip of wine. _We mourn like soldiers._

He decided, perhaps, it was time he closed the distance, just a little, to offer his condolences. Perhaps even, if it didn’t feel too dangerous, to crack open the scotch like they had done once on a cold winter’s night by the fireplace, back when things were easier and simpler.

Haruki's car arrived back at the compound a little after dusk.

Klaus steeled himself and headed up the steps towards Haruki's office. It would be a drink or two, he told himself. And Kolya would almost definitely be there; a perfect safeguard against any more unruly thoughts. Kolya might even be persuaded to have a drink with them. Klaus smirked at the implausible idea of what the Eurotean would look like drunk.

Light beneath the door. Klaus knocked. There was a pause before Haruki called from within.

The first thing Klaus noticed was that Kolya wasn’t there. Kaiser greeted him at the door. Haruki leaned against his desk like he did once, on the night he and Klaus had stayed up late, talking.

And then Klaus noticed, just like that night, that there was a glass in his hand with an amber hint of scotch at the bottom of it.

He chuckled.

‘I came here to try to get you to do... exactly what you’re doing,’ he said wryly.

Before Haruki could ask him what he meant, Klaus asked, ‘Where’s Mr Small Talk?’

Haruki’s head a moment ago had been filled with memories of being at Ao’s family home, which he had visited countless times in his youth. The heart-wrenching smiles of his parents, who said they were proud their son had the chance to serve under commanders like Taki Reizen and now Haruki. He and Ryoumei had shared a small bottle of sake after they were done. By the time Kolya drove them back to the compound, the numbness granted by the sake had receded a little and Haruki had decided to throw a bit of scotch back before sleep, just to forget the way Ao’s mother had smiled at him before she broke down in tears.

All those memories fled to the edges of his mind as soon as Klaus stepped into his office. Even though the alcohol swilled a little in Haruki's head, it also managed to selectively heighten his senses so he was able to take in all the details.

Shirtsleeves rolled up in the heat, tie loose, relaxed smile. But still something guarded in his golden eyes.

Haruki dropped his gaze to the floor. He remembered that Klaus had asked him where Kolya was.

‘I told him I wanted to be alone,’ he said.

Klaus noticed the pause between his question and Haruki’s answer. An answer that didn't sound like him. He wondered how much the kid had had to drink.

‘Was that a hint?’ Klaus asked, with a self-deprecating lilt.

Haruki looked up and hesitated.

‘No,’ he said truthfully.

Klaus was grateful that the oblivious, tail-wagging presence of Kaiser provided a buffer between them. He idly ran a hand over the dog’s head and flanks and stayed where he was near the door. Leaning against the desk, Haruki was again in his vest and shirtsleeves, buttons glinting in the low light from the desk lamp, long legs crossed at the ankles. The light danced in his hair in little glimmers.

His expression was drawn and preoccupied.

‘I’m sorry about your friend, kid,’ Klaus said. ‘Ao, was it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Must have been rough today.’

‘It was alright. It was good to see his parents.’

Haruki’s quiet words made Klaus think about Sumi; the closest thing to a parent that Taki had left. Sumi and Midori and Chiyeko and Hebe. And Yura and her family. And Taki’s ashes that were laid to rest in a nearby shrine.

With everything that had happened after Hokane, he hadn’t been able to fulfil his own promise to himself that visiting the shrine would be the first thing he did after the battle was over. It was about time he went.

‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘If you don’t need me tomorrow I was hoping to take off for a few hours. I’ve been putting off going to the Reizen residence, but…’

Haruki looked at him. Klaus’ gaze was somewhere in the distance again. He felt, beneath the hurt and confusion of the past week, a flicker of his old, familiar sorrow on Klaus’ behalf. If the death of Ao had hit Haruki so deeply, he could only imagine the kind of pain that Klaus had been through.

And suddenly, he did imagine. He imagined that Klaus had been killed last week in Hokane. He imagined Klaus’ name on the list of casualties. He imagined Klaus’ body lying beside his bike. And his throat closed with grief just at the thought. The sake and scotch merged in his head and heightened the sensation.

He put the glass down on the desk beside him and hoped none of it had shown on his face.

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ he said.

Klaus had noticed something. A flicker of pain that crossed Haruki’s features that he didn’t understand.

‘Thanks, kid,’ he said carefully. He gave Kaiser a final pat before turning to leave. ‘Try not to drink too much. Hangovers and briefings don’t go well together, trust me.’

Haruki didn’t smile. Klaus didn’t even know if he had heard. That strange look of hurt still lingered somewhere on his face. 

Klaus' hand was on the door handle. A very strong voice was telling him, almost warning him, to leave. But something niggled at the back of his head. Ever since Hokane. Something that slid in and out of focus, lost in the emotions that Klaus could barely keep track of any longer. And so he turned back.

‘You seem... distracted lately, kid. What’s going on?’

At that, Haruki looked up, still looking pained. More anxious than Klaus had ever seen him.

There was a long silence.

Haruki’s mind buzzed from the events of a week that felt as though it had been dredged from a bad dream. And feelings that he had kept hidden for so long that they almost didn’t feel like they were his to control anymore. Feelings that had been vindicated in dangerous little snippets when Haruki remembered that Klaus had been the one who kissed him, no matter what his reasons were. It had been Klaus.

The sake and scotch made that voice louder. It had been Klaus. And so maybe – just maybe –

He stared at the ground, his pulse hammering, and thought only of how tired he was, and how sick of himself and his pathetic secret. And how much he wanted to be unburdened of it.

'I can't stop thinking about what happened in Hokane,’ he said, eyes on the floor, so quietly Klaus couldn’t be sure he heard right. ‘When you... when we –’   
  
Klaus' pulse skyrocketed.

'It’s... all I can think about,' Haruki said, voice still low.

It came to Klaus in flashes again, now even more pronounced and awful that Haruki had wilfully brought it up. He thought, especially, of the look in Haruki’s face when he pulled back. That shock. How much more could he be made to feel like the basest of creatures?

'Kid, I've already told you,' he began falteringly, his voice tight. 'I should never have done that. Okay? I’m sorry.'  
  
Again, Haruki was silent for a while, realising that Klaus hadn’t understood.

Haruki sighed softly and tried to understand the feeling inside him then. Fatalism. Resignation. Hope. How could it be all three? Whatever it was, it made him lift his head and look Klaus straight in the eye. Ten years of longing rose up inside him. And tipped over.  
  
'I'm not,' he said, quietly and clearly.

And Klaus felt a hot flare pass through him. Even more than Haruki's words - the simple words that took Klaus a few more seconds to understand - his eyes held an emotion Klaus hadn't seen in them before. Something startling and powerful.

 _What do you mean?_ he was on the point of saying. Even as his pulse filled his ears, he knew how vital it was that he got Haruki to clarify precisely what he meant. But Haruki’s eyes, earnest and defiant at the same time, answered for him.

Klaus crossed the space between them. One of Haruki’s hands instinctively braced against the desk behind him when Klaus drew close.

_I'm not._

Haruki wasn't sorry for what Klaus had done. Which meant –

He reached down and gripped Haruki's arms. He wanted to pull Haruki off the table and kiss him and bury himself in him until he forgot the pain and confusion of everything else. Haruki’s eyes were huge beneath him, taking him in, his lips slightly parted, his cheeks coloured – from the scotch or from Klaus, he couldn’t be sure.

But Klaus realised, only then, only when he was close enough to see the little shards of light glancing off Haruki’s dark irises, that he had expected something else. He realised he had come to associate closeness like that – that kind of intimacy – with a certain scent. A scent that had followed him since childhood and whose source he had found, finally, in someone he had loved and given himself to. The only person he had ever loved. The one he had always been fated to find.

The one he had lost.

He smelled something sweet on Haruki. Something sweet mingled with musk mingled with hints of a cologne that brought a moonlit balcony to mind. But it wasn’t the same.

And it made Klaus let go.

* * *

Haruki’s heart was threatening to beat out of his chest. Klaus' gaze, the grip on his arms - it had all happened too quickly and Haruki had the sense, rightly, that it would slip away quickly too. And so when Klaus released him and moved back, he reached out without thinking and grasped Klaus’ sleeve.

‘Wait –'

Klaus, still lost, still unsure what the hell either of them were doing, glanced down. He thought he saw a hint of little brass airplanes at Haruki’s wrists.

Haruki pushed off the desk and reached up, slowly and hesitantly, to touch Klaus’ face beneath his scar. The warmth of his hand almost made Klaus want to close his eyes. But he kept them open as Haruki stepped in close. He kept his eyes open right up until the moment when Haruki’s lips met his.

The fact that Haruki had kissed him, entirely of his own volition, took several seconds make an imprint. Haruki’s lips moved gently and Klaus’ responses were slow. Almost hesitant. Though the act was the same, it was a world away from Klaus’ violent, completely instinct-driven move on the streets of Hokane. In fact, it powerfully conjured the soft, careful first kiss Klaus had shared with Taki in Luckenwalde. His gentleness, Klaus' gentleness that day, was now Haruki’s. Taki’s hesitation, his dazed response, was now Klaus’ own.

And then Haruki, just as gently, drew back. His eyes were half-lidded and misted over and his cheeks even more flushed. His lips had tasted like scotch.

Only slightly shocked at himself, Haruki was mostly caught in the realisation of how unresponsive Klaus had been. How half-hearted the movement of his broad lips. He swallowed and pulled back further and tried to read the look in Klaus’ eyes.

That was when Klaus lunged.

Haruki threw an arm back again to brace himself when Klaus’ mouth locked onto his, tongue pushing past his lips. He left his senses behind when Klaus pushed him backwards onto the desk, pressing between Haruki’s legs, pressing their chests together, arms vice-like around Haruki’s waist.

The glass of scotch was knocked off the edge and smashed to pieces on the timber floor.

* * *

A warm, heavy spring night.

Crickets trilled in a high, even pitch.

Leaves rustled and moved on their branches, touched by moonlight at some angles and lost in darkness at others.

A feline shadow darted into the bushes by the path with a reproachful backwards gaze.

Klaus saw none of it.

He opened the door to his shed half an hour later and sat heavily on his bed, lost in Haruki.

He could still feel him. His skin and his lips. He could still taste that musk and sweetness. He heard his voice. The staggered moans. His high-strung whispers.

Klaus' depraved thoughts over the past few weeks had been no match at all for what had just happened.

_Do it... I want to feel you come._

And, just like that, Klaus felt himself stiffening again.

'Fuck,' he whispered angrily.

He lay back in bed and the memories flooded him one after the other until he almost subconsciously unbuckled his belt and grasped his cock. He grit his teeth, eyes closed, and the images kept pouring.


	55. More

After the glass smashed on the floor, and went completely unnoticed, Klaus heavily palmed Haruki’s waist and back, all the way up to his neck. His tongue delved deeper into Haruki’s mouth, tasting more scotch as well as a hint of something else. Perhaps sake.

And he felt Haruki's body pressing back just as ardently.

Kaiser had struck up a distressed series of yelps when the glass broke and his master was pinned on the table, but he was loathe to attack Klaus, whom he adored. And so he whined and fretted, pacing in the shadow of the desk with his tail swinging low.

It took only a handful of seconds for something to become clear to Klaus. He recalled the night he had kissed Taki in Luckenwalde. How Taki didn't know how much to give back or whether to give back at all. How he didn't know what do with his hands, his lips. How his own moans seemed to startle him. It all came back to him and helped him realise, or rather confirm, that this was far from Haruki's first time.

Kolya di Lupo came to mind again in a flash of angry green eyes. Klaus channelled that searing jealousy into Haruki; pulling Haruki's hips in even further so their cocks, both hard and straining, were pressed together almost painfully, and by tugging his head back so Klaus could kiss and suck at his neck.  
  
Haruki's first moan came from deep in his throat, low and earnest. The sound filled Klaus' head before shooting to his dick. He knew, by then, that he wouldn't be able to hold himself back. He barely even had time to come to terms with the eagerness of Haruki’s lips and hands. All he knew was that he wanted to run his hands over Haruki’s naked body as soon as he could and fuck him. He wanted to see Haruki gasp and writhe.

He fumbled at the buttons on Haruki’s vest and broke free from Haruki’s lips so he could focus on undoing them.

Haruki, trying to catch up but sinking into a kind of vivid denial, watched as Klaus loomed above him, his hands making swift work of the buttons of his vest and then his shirt. Klaus' face was still close. Even when focused on Haruki’s clothes, there was a hunger in his eyes that left Haruki breathless.

He stared, completely overcome.

_Klaus…_

As though Klaus heard him, his gaze snapped up and Haruki’s breath caught in his throat. He was swept back in Klaus’ kiss again, his breath hot and his tongue merciless. It was all Haruki could do to keep up.

His vest and shirt were torn off him, the cuff links snagging painfully at his wrists. As Klaus bared Haruki’s skin, he caught a glimpse of strong shoulders and the deep clefts of Haruki's collarbones. He succumbed, suddenly, to the urge to bite his neck. Hard.

Haruki cried out sharply, fingers buried in Klaus’ hair. He realised that he was about to be devoured. His whole body thrummed in anticipation.

‘Nngh – Klaus…’

Without any further warning, Klaus pulled him off the desk, wrapping Haruki’s legs around his hips, lips locked, and they were suddenly both sprawled on the floor before the empty fireplace.

* * *

Dusk slipped quietly into night beyond the window.

On the floor, his legs still hooked around Klaus’ hips, Haruki arched his neck as Klaus kissed it, shivering when Klaus licked the mark he had left only seconds ago.

Klaus stared down at the perfectly toned body that was revealed to him. Stronger than Taki’s, with defined abdominals and oblique muscles running along his sides. And his scent was everywhere, one that he had caught in snatches over the months but one that now filled Klaus’ head. A sweet musk and a light but heady cologne.

When Klaus reared back slightly to look at him, Haruki reached up to undo Klaus’ shirt. That was when he discovered that the alcohol and his ever-present disbelief had significantly impaired the finer points of his coordination. Halfway down Klaus’ shirt, he tugged impatiently and the rest came away through sheer force.

The feeling of having his clothes ripped from him was entirely alien to Klaus. He watched as Haruki, eyes misted over, ran his long hands along Klaus' chest and shoulders, down his arms. His touch was deliberate. Insistent. Almost reverent.

Klaus uttered a low growl and kissed him again and revelled in the way Haruki kissed back, rising up to meet him, matching his fervour, his hands now clinging to Klaus’ neck. It made him wonder how long the kid had wanted him.

He broke away and bent low to take one of Haruki’s nipples between his teeth. He heard Haruki’s gasp from above. And then, before he could stop himself, he had suddenly clenched his teeth and tugged.

 _‘Ah,’_ Haruki cried out, his body jerking away reflexively. But, to Klaus’ surprise, Haruki’s hands closed in his hair and held his head in place. ‘Ugh… yes…’

‘Shit,’ Klaus hissed, feeling himself slipping fast out of control.

At no point in the past few heated seconds had Haruki shown any reluctance or held Klaus back. There was only a wantonness in the kid’s eyes that sparked a dangerous fire in him. The young commander was spread beneath him, panting, willing. His hair spilled over the hearth. In a matter of minutes, all of Haruki, his entire body, had become Klaus’.

To reinforce the point, he slipped his hand past Haruki’s belt and grasped his cock hard. He watched as Haruki squeezed his eyes shut and arched his back.

‘Klaus…’ he whispered, as though he had something urgent to say.

The heat from Klaus’ hand coursed powerfully through Haruki’s body. Haruki was suddenly afraid that he would come. That he wouldn’t be able to bask in this fantasy, in this moment that still didn’t seem real, for longer than a few minutes.

_Wait…_

That very particular fear was augmented after Klaus tugged his pants and shoes away and left him lying bare before him, gasping for breath. Klaus only took a moment to drink in the sight before he parted Haruki’s legs and dove down to taste him for the first time.

He felt and tasted different. He held Haruki’s legs open as he lapped and thrust his tongue into him, wanting to be fully immersed in that new taste. He then slipped his fingers into Haruki’s hole, coated in spit, and remembered the intense heat of another’s body.

‘Ugh!’ Haruki gasped. ‘Oh, fuck! Klaus –’

Klaus’ ears rang with the whispered obscenity. He wondered, suddenly, how much of it owed to the alcohol.

Haruki was sure that his grip in Klaus’ hair was painful but he had nothing else to hold onto when the unreal wet heat of Klaus’ mouth and tongue found him where he was most sensitive, where he quivered and pulsed and melted and longed for more. Klaus’ huge fingers probed deep into him, pushing and twisting hungrily between laps of his tongue. Haruki had started to moan so loudly he was worried that someone would hear. He was vaguely aware of Kaiser who had curled up uncomfortably by the desk and occasionally emitted a whimper.

And more than any of it, he was aware that he was being driven far too close to the edge.

‘Klaus, that’s enough,’ he managed, his voice hoarse and shaky. ‘Please…’

It was the first hint of resistance that Klaus heard. Its familiarity came almost as a relief. And it brought about a familiar, dangerous desire to see how much further the young commander could be pushed. He plunged his fingers even deeper.

‘Mmmh…’ Haruki moaned, writhing beneath him just as Klaus had imagined. ‘Klaus, please! Put it in…’

Klaus, having never heard that before in his life, looked up in shock.

‘What?’

‘Put it in…’ Haruki’s hand was still in Klaus’ hair and he was still conscious of how close he was to coming. ‘Hurry. Please…’

The rush that Klaus felt then was like nothing he had felt before.

He freed his cock, hooked Haruki’s legs up over his shoulders and lined himself up. He felt the heat from Haruki against his tip and nearly groaned.

Haruki’s hands tried to get a hold on something, but neither the hearth nor the polished floorboards gave him any grip.

And then Klaus’ cock pushed in.

Pain, pleasure, and a hot, pulsing sense of disbelief raced through Haruki. Before he had time to moan, Klaus had crushed him beneath his torso and covered his mouth in a kiss. Klaus’ cock, an implausible size, an implausible heat, plunged further and further with each thrust, each thrust pushing a moan from Haruki’s mouth and each moan smothered against Klaus’ mouth.

When Klaus finally reared his head, Haruki’s cries filled the room.

 _‘Ah!_  Klaus!’

The heat and tightness of Haruki’s body was something Klaus hadn’t experienced in so long that he had almost forgotten what it was like. The urgency of it. How powerfully it made him want to come; to fill up the body beneath him until it was dripping in Klaus’ come.

‘God, you feel so fucking good, kid.’

He thrust further until he was, finally, plunging with the full length of his cock. He kissed the skin just below Haruki’s collarbone and sucked hard, far too hard, until he knew it must hurt. He heard Haruki’s sharp cry, and felt Haruki’s arms close around him, pressing him even closer.

‘Yes…’ Haruki panted, tears dotting his eyes. ‘Klaus –’

Klaus pulled back and watched as the huge mark he had made darkened angrily on Haruki’s skin. And it reminded him of the burns that he hadn’t yet seen.

He abruptly pulled out, took Haruki’s arm and turned him over onto his stomach.

Stretching over the left half of Haruki’s back, and down the back of his left arm to his elbow, was a wide area of scar tissue, glossy and rippling like the surface of the ocean.

Something spliced in over Klaus’ hunger then. A tender fascination. He ran his fingers gently over the skin that was more or less the same colour as the healthy skin around it, only slightly redder.

Haruki felt the large hands tracing out his year-old burns and he was filled, suddenly, with an anxious embarrassment. It was the first time anyone other than Suguri and Kolya – Kolya only during the few times he had needed help dressing – had seen them. He was worried that Klaus would be put off by it. By how marred and impure he must look.

But suddenly Klaus lifted Haruki's hips and gripped the back of his neck and his dick had plunged in so far and fast that Haruki sank onto his elbows. His fingers pulled at the floor above his head and he moaned in time with each thrust, and he knew his climax was rushing up to greet him far too quickly. But by then, he was too gone to care.

‘Harder!’ he urged. ‘Ugh! Deeper, Klaus!’

The words ringing between his ears again, Klaus crawled forwards and bit him hard on the neck. Haruki cried out and came, bucking slightly beneath Klaus, spilling over the floor.

Klaus then turned him back around and, with arms planted on either side of his head, started pounding harder than ever before.

‘This deep enough?’ he growled.

Haruki’s eyes were still lost in his climax.

‘Mmmh… you feel so good,’ he mumbled, voice shaking under the impact of Klaus' thrusts. ‘More…’

Klaus grit his teeth and felt himself slip even further out of control. He shoved his fingers into Haruki’s mouth, far enough for spit to flow down Haruki’s chin.

‘Kid, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to come right now.’

With tears in his eyes, Haruki tried to say something. Klaus withdrew his fingers.

‘Do it,’ Haruki gasped, eyes locked on Klaus. ‘I want to feel you come.’

That was all it took. Klaus buried his face in Haruki’s neck and pushed as much of himself as far into Haruki as possible. He came so hard that small lights popped in his vision.

And Haruki felt him. He felt Klaus shudder and release deep inside him before collapsing on top of him, and he still wasn’t convinced that any of it had happened.

* * *

Klaus lay there for a long time, gasping, hearing Haruki trying to catch his breath underneath him. Sweet musk and cologne. And, fainter than that, the varnish from the floorboards.

And then Klaus lifted himself up slowly. He returned to himself slowly.

He looked down and saw Haruki’s swollen lips. He saw the huge, angry mark beneath his collarbone. And he remembered the numerous times he had bitten him. How he had felt almost completely unrestrained each time. A familiar anxiety filtered into him, trickling in from the edges.

‘You okay, kid?’ he said, hearing how hoarse his voice was. ‘I think I… might have gone a bit too far.’

Haruki blinked a few times. Then he smiled tiredly. It was the first genuine smile Klaus had seen from him in over a week.

‘I’m fine,’ Haruki said, still a little breathless. He searched for the words to convey the weight of the past few minutes. He knew he wouldn’t even be able to come close. ‘That was… so good.’

Klaus lifted his eyebrows slightly.

Haruki's response, and everything that came before it, made him wonder whether he had dreamt it all. He didn't know Haruki had had the same thought only seconds ago. He began to sink again, trying to brace most of his weight on his forearms, even though his climax had hit him so hard that he felt ready to drop.

And then, suddenly, he was falling onto rose-infused pillows back at the cottage, with a spent and panting Taki beneath him, obsidian hair splayed.

His stomach gave an awful little lurch. With some effort, he stopped himself from sinking fully onto Haruki. He glanced down and saw the way Haruki still watched him. How his eyes seemed a little unfocused.

It made Klaus reluctantly lift the corner of his mouth.

‘Just how drunk are you, Commander?’

Haruki was suddenly a bit too dazed to reply. He stared up at Klaus. The bare torso hovering over him. The strength of Klaus' arms, the chiselled jaw, the features that were sharp and strong and beautiful. He wanted to reach out and touch him again. Trace his scar. Take his time. Let himself slowly open up to the possibility that Klaus truly had been his for a few minutes in front of an empty fireplace.

But Klaus lifted away completely before Haruki had the chance to move his hand.

A little disoriented by the empty space above him, Haruki raised up onto his elbow in time to catch the shirt that Klaus tossed to him.

‘We should get a move on,’ Klaus said, glancing at his watch. ‘Isn’t this around the time when –?’

A knock on the door.

‘Haruki-sama?’ a sweet, high voice called. ‘Will you be taking your dinner in your office or room tonight?’

Haruki’s pulse surged and he tried to get to his feet. Klaus helped him up.

Despite the fact that there was no denying or going back from what had just happened, despite the knowledge that all of it would only open up more uncertainty and more confusion, Klaus couldn’t help the the tired, wry smirk that crossed his lips. As far as obliging groundskeepers and door-knock interruptions went, it appeared that some things hadn’t changed at all in ten years.

* * *

The next morning, Haruki awoke with a small groan and rolled over.

It was a warm, silent morning, with a few hesitant bird calls piercing the air. His head complained very slightly when he sat up and it occurred to him then, much more than the previous evening, how much he must have had to drink. He opened his eyes slowly.

Then the memories flooded in, tinged by sake and scotch. 

Klaus.

Klaus on top of him. Inside him. His cock relentless and just so damn huge.

Haruki blushed.

It didn't have the tenor of his usual fantasies about Klaus so he was sure, finally, that it was real. It was real. It had happened.

The look of mild shock remained on his face as he staggered to the shower. It remained as he stood still under the water. It was there even as he gingerly pulled his uniform on, wondering how he would be in any fit state to spar that day or talk strategy.

He remembered telling the maid, through the door, that he would take his dinner in his room. He remembered dressing, feeling numb. He remembered that Klaus had walked with him to his room and told him to eat something and get some sleep. And Klaus had turned and left before Haruki had worked up the courage to ask him to stay. Haruki had been left with a tray of food that he hadn’t been able to touch and an anxious, sensitive Kaiser who was still convinced that something awful had happened to his master.

He remembered the disappointment that followed after Klaus left. His irrational resentment of the maid who had interrupted. All of those feelings were overcome the following morning, replaced by mounting anxiety about what it all meant. What it would mean from now on.

His skin was tender to the touch in places. Places that had stung slightly in the shower. Places that Klaus had marked.

He opened the door to Kolya, who was standing where he always was. Overly tuned to Haruki’s mood, Kolya noticed that something was different about him.

‘Are you alright, sir?’ he asked softly.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki replied.

‘You don’t look it,’ said another voice.

Startled, Haruki glanced around. Klaus stood near the hallway window wearing a half-smile. Eyes that were damning. Eyes that had watched Haruki come while he fucked him.

Haruki blushed again, to his roots. He hadn’t been ready to face Klaus so early, and in front of Kolya to boot.

‘I’m – I’m alright,’ he reiterated.

‘Hangovers and briefings don’t go well together,’ Klaus reminded him impishly as he walked over.

Unsure how to reply, feeling slightly numb again, Haruki turned and walked automatically towards the exit. Even though Klaus walked a little behind him and to the left, Haruki felt like he could see his simmering gaze before his eyes.

Klaus, meanwhile, had tried to ignore the way his heart had given a small flip when Haruki walked out of his bedroom, eyes downcast and looking somewhat weathered. He had tried to ignore the prick of jealousy he felt as he and Kolya exchanged words in a low, familiar murmur.

His plan was to catch Haruki in the morning, before his shadow found him, to make sure he was okay since the previous night, and to say things they hadn't had a chance to say. But he had arrived outside Haruki’s bedroom only to come face-to-face with Kolya, as silent and stoic as ever, already stationed before the door. Klaus almost sighed in annoyance at how seriously the Eurotean took his job, even though he was also reluctantly relieved about that very fact. Besides all that, Klaus couldn’t help but take some comfort in the fact that Kolya didn’t appear to have spent the night in Haruki’s bedroom.

Nevertheless, there was only silence and tension between them until their commander opened the door.

* * *

Aside from a few emissaries that had been sent from the capital to check on the state of their remaining troops and tanks, and order even more of them to be deployed to the capital for reinforcements, the day passed with the regularity of most other days in the compound.

Klaus didn’t act any differently or say or do anything that gave either of them away, though Haruki could swear that he could feel feel Klaus' eyes following him even after he turned away.

 _Just look at him!_ a young cadet had sneered once, trying to make Haruki see reason. _He’s weird! Why would he come all this way just to become a knight? Plus, the way he stares at Taki-sama is scary._

Haruki felt his head spin at how surreally things had turned out since that day almost ten years ago.

He had no idea what was happening between himself and the captain. Whether it had already happened and would never happen again or whether it meant nothing or meant everything. But despite that, and despite the tiny dumbbells that rolled around in his head from his morning’s hangover, Haruki strangely felt as though he was floating.

 _Impossible is possible's favourite disguise,_ Ukiyo had said, in his boundless wisdom.

As the day wore on, Klaus tried and failed to find a time when Kolya wasn’t at Haruki’s elbow. By the time the afternoon's hand-to-hand training session came to an end and Haruki headed back to his room to shower and change, Klaus had lost his patience.

He had watched Haruki whirl and lunge with all of his usual strength and precision and was impressed at how swiftly he had managed to overcome his slight hangover from that morning. It still struck Klaus how seamlessly Haruki could flit from the world of the everyday to the world of the lofty.

And how seamlessly he could flit from the world of the noble to the world of the depraved. Klaus could still hardly believe it. Flashes from the previous night swam across his vision.

The temptation arose several times throughout the training session. Klaus had been close to stepping up and challenging the commander like he had done in months past. But he refrained. His desire to tear away Haruki's kendogi would most likely take centre stage and he couldn’t spare the effort of controlling his hunger in broad daylight.

Hunger that had returned in full force since the previous night. Since he returned to his shed still locked in the memory of their brief and turbulent bout of passion. He had awoken with the same urge and had gone through the day occasionally swatting those images away.

The young, charming commander who, under Klaus’ hand, had transformed into something else. Something he wouldn’t have foreseen in a million years.

Of all of their contortions, of all the words and sounds that had been pushed from Haruki’s throat, the one that Klaus kept returning to was a single murmur that he'd heard after Haruki had already come.

_More._

And so, by the time he followed close on Haruki’s heels after the spar, his desire to simply speak to Haruki – to wisely and advisedly clarify a situation that was fast spinning out of control – had slowly begun to give way to a far more primal need.

And still there was the small thorn in the form of Kolya.

‘Kid,’ he said, his voice a little taut. ‘I need to talk to you in private. About that matter we discussed. Earlier.’

It sounded false and wooden even to him. He was sure Kolya would have picked up on it. Haruki shot him a strange look but then, after holding his gaze for a few moments, he turned to Kolya and dismissed him.

Kolya balled his fists and remained outside. Haruki and Klaus entered the building and the doors swung closed behind them.

* * *

The previous night, Klaus had hesitated for a split second before he left Haruki standing at the doorway to his bedroom. The bedroom that had once been Taki’s. He had considered going in, but in the aftermath of what had happened in the office, it seemed like an indiscretion that was too great.

Now, with a far more urgent need at the forefront of his mind, Klaus had no problem striding quickly through the large door after Haruki.

It closed behind them. The curtains were open and sunlight poured into the room. It was like they were outside.

Haruki took a few steps into the room, his heart once again hammering like a caged beast, before he turned. Klaus pulled him into a kiss that seemed to catch on the hem of the previous night and dragged them along mercilessly in its wake.

Haruki had the strange sensation like he was made of something new thanks to Klaus’ touch; like his body was teeming with an energy it hadn’t known before. Klaus’ hands were suddenly everywhere. They slipped between the folds of Haruki's kendogi right as they reached the bed.

‘I’ve been dying to tear this off you for hours,’ he said in a raspy undertone.

Haruki shivered and flushed.

Klaus loosened the sash around his slim waist and the billowing lower half of the uniform began to fall away. He tugged and pulled at the white top half until Haruki was again naked before him, flush with the light from the sun.

He spun Haruki around and pushed him forwards onto the bed. He pulled his hips up and spread him wide.

Haruki felt the cold air on his hole and gasped. His gasp turned into a moan when Klaus’ finger pushed in. He felt it without any of the numbing effects of alcohol from the night before. This time it was raw and real and blinding in the too-bright room. He gripped the edge of mattress as Klaus’ fingers probed as deep as they would go. And then he felt, again, the wet heat of Klaus’ mouth.

Klaus gripped his behind firmly before running both hands up the back of Haruki’s thighs, working his tongue further in. He pulled back then, just for recon. The young commander was kneeling face-down on the bed, hanging onto the edge of the mattress like it could save him, completely open to him. Klaus pushed two fingers into him then, without warning, just to bask in the deep groan it elicited.

He took Haruki's arm and flipped him around, again taking a moment to admire the strength of his body, and kissed him hard. He felt Haruki’s hands on his face and neck. Eager. Hungry. Just as hungry as he was.

It made him wonder again. He drew back a little.

‘How long?’

Haruki tried to find his breath. ‘What?’

‘You said you weren’t sorry that I kissed you in Hokane. So how long have you wanted me? We talking days or weeks?’

He began undoing his belt.

_Days or weeks…_

Haruki tried to align the words with the true, horrifying extent of the truth. For once, he was glad he was already blushing.

‘A – a while,’ he said nervously.

Klaus grinned, belt undone. He was kneeling on the bed, back straight, with Haruki sprawled before him.

‘Prove it.’

After a beat where Haruki didn’t understand, he glanced from Klaus’ face to his belt. And then he felt himself leaking just from those two words.

He sat up and bent low, releasing Klaus’ huge, stiff cock, tapered and curved slightly, leaking like his own, and took him down his throat in one hit.

Klaus clenched Haruki’s hair and groaned.

* * *

He realised there was no longer any point comparing Haruki with Taki. Sex with Haruki was a different animal entirely.

Haruki's body was firm and supple, quick to respond to his movements, sometimes almost foreseeing his desires. Klaus felt the entirely new thrill of commanding a willing body that he could mould with each touch. He would pull out and reach for Haruki’s arm and Haruki would comply instantly, turning onto all fours and bracing himself with a hand on the bedhead.

After holding Haruki there and pounding into him, drawing out each moan, feeling his body cling to Klaus’ cock on each withdrawal, Klaus would push his face to the bed and hold him there and by way of response Haruki would reach both his arms back and hold himself open for Klaus to barrel into him. Haruki’s sexual appetite was nothing short of astounding. It seemed there was nothing that Klaus wanted that Haruki didn’t.

As soon as Klaus withdrew, grabbed Haruki’s hips and turned him over, Haruki's legs would wrap around him and his mouth melted earnestly and roughly against Klaus’. And Klaus would plunge back into Haruki’s heat, moans erupting once more, and muffled once more against Klaus' mouth.

When Klaus sensed he was on the brink, he stopped, wanting it to last longer. Haruki, who was beneath him at the time, looked up and seemed to understand. By then, sweat covered their bodies in a thin, glossy layer. With a hand on Klaus' chest, Haruki gently pushed him back and lifted himself up until Klaus was lying on his back. Haruki then swung a leg over his hips.

As he lowered himself onto Klaus' cock with a moan that was quickly becoming familiar, Klaus found himself holding his breath. Here, again was something he hadn't seen for over a decade. Taki had never been comfortable on top, and even then Klaus had had to manoeuvre both their bodies. Haruki rode him with gusto, with a strength in his core and a look in his eye Klaus hadn't seen before. His head sometimes hung forwards so his hair fell in his eyes, other times his neck arched back so Klaus, almost without willing it, would reach out and run a hand over his jaw and Adam’s apple.

When Klaus grabbed his hips and started meeting his gyrations with merciless upward thrusts, Haruki's moans changed. He looked down.

‘Klaus... if you keep... ugh.... I'm going to –’

Klaus clenched his teeth and gripped Haruki’s cock.

‘Go ahead, kid. Let me see you shoot.’

And, with a final throw back of his head, Haruki came over Klaus’ hand and chest.

Just as Haruki tightened around Klaus’ cock, Klaus sat up and pulled him closer, feeling a familiar heat rising in his balls.

‘I’m about to come. You ready?’

‘Nngh...’ Haruki’s head was still slack from his climax and Klaus' unceasing thrusts. But he still managed to answer. ‘Yes… ugh, yes!’

And Klaus came, one hand braced behind him on the bed, Haruki straddling his hips.

Afterwards, there was only panting between them for a while. And sweat. Their foreheads rested against one another, both seeing bright streaks of white in their vision.

Haruki hoped he would never forget the moment when Klaus watched him come and sat up so their faces were close, so Haruki could feel his breath on his neck. That look right before he moved closer – like Haruki was all there was in the world.

When he slowly regained his senses, he realised he was still sitting astride Klaus’ lap, holding onto the back of his neck. Klaus' hands were on his lower back, occasionally sliding up towards his shoulders before coming back down. Haruki wondered if Klaus was doing it on purpose or if he was also in the throes of his climax.

He realised bemusedly that he didn't care.

It was Klaus.

In his bed.

* * *

Klaus lowered Haruki to the bed and slipped out of him. He glanced down and saw his come spilling out of Haruki and down his thigh. The ripple of lust it inspired made him bite the crook of Haruki's neck, gently this time. When Haruki made a soft noise in response, face glowing and flushed, Klaus’ cock stirred again.

He rolled off Haruki and onto his back with his right arm splayed near Haruki’s head. They lay there for a few seconds, bathed in sunlight.

‘You’ve done this before, huh?’ Klaus said, quietly but suddenly.

Haruki’s pulse picked up.

‘Yeah,’ he said carefully.

The jealousy was as powerful as it was irrational. The thought that someone – and Klaus had a pretty good idea who – had been there before him, and taught Haruki to do all those things, threatened to revive a scaly beast in his gut that hadn’t been around since the time of Hans Regenwalde.

He tried to mask it by keeping his tone light.

‘Kolya’s not going to come after me for this, is he?’

Haruki blinked and turned his head.

After a few seconds, he realised he preferred for Klaus to think it was Kolya rather than know the truth. He flushed at the thought.

‘Of course not,’ he said dismissively, turning back to face the ceiling.

Klaus wasn’t sure what to make of his guarded, ambiguous answer. But he wondered if it was confirmation, perhaps, that they weren’t sleeping together any longer.

Thoughts of Kolya receded when he turned to look at Haruki’s face in profile. The angular jaw and youthful, beautiful curve of his cheek.

He then had a sudden, pointless flashback to the cadet who had gripped his jacket as he stood on the back of his bike.

He sighed.

‘I know I’m already going to hell,’ he said. ‘But I’ve racked up another few good reasons for it.’

Haruki looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

Klaus met his gaze. He lowered his arm slightly, the one near Haruki’s head, and gently brushed those few errant strands of hair that always curled over his forehead into his eyes.

‘I mean you’re just a kid,’ Klaus said, his tone doleful and self-deprecating, even as his lips curved in a faint, guilty smile.

Although he lay there with the one he had always thought was out of his reach, the one whose fingers were brushing through his hair, his words made Haruki wonder whether he had, in fact, done enough in the past ten years to be worthy of him.

‘I guess you _were_  a kid,’ Klaus went on, vaguely and drowsily, almost to himself. ‘I guess you’re not anymore.’

Haruki stared back into his eyes. He felt a strange, magnetic pull that made him roll onto his side and move closer. Klaus hesitated for a moment before slowly turning his head and body to meet him. The kiss was slow but still deep; lips and tongues gently feeling out the other, learning taste and texture and sensation.

Klaus pulled away but kept his face close to Haruki's and kept a hand closed tight around his arm. Tilting his head, he swept his gaze from Haruki's face down the full length of his body, which was bright in the sunlight. He clenched his jaw. He realised his head was spinning. He wasn’t sure why.

Haruki reached out and touched his face, his heart beating madly again.

He wanted suddenly, more than anything, to say it.

It was on the tip of his tongue.

‘Klaus,’ he said softly. ‘Klaus, I –’

‘I should get going.’

The hunger had kept the guilt and betrayal at bay. But it found Klaus once more, just like it found him the previous night when he left Haruki alone at the door to his bedroom. He felt it strongest a few moments ago, when he kissed Haruki and held him close. Almost held him close.

He remembered the boy who had asked for him beneath swaying purple flowers.

Despite the warmth of the hand on his cheek, and though it sounded like Haruki had been on the point of saying something, Klaus abruptly lifted up and away.

Surprised, Haruki curled his hand back.

‘Oh –’

As he watched Klaus reach for his clothes, Haruki was suddenly, infinitely grateful he hadn’t said what he had been about to say. His momentary foolishness and naivety left him feeling a little stunned.

Klaus looked over his shoulder at him.

‘Rest up. You have a few hours until your meeting with the capital, right?’

‘I – yeah.’

Kaiser, who had been left on the other side of the bedroom door, scratched at it and let out a small, pitiful whine.

‘Someone’s jealous,’ Klaus observed with a grin as he walked towards the door. After being let in, Kaiser sprang onto the bed by Haruki’s feet, still very much unsure about recent developments.

Standing near the door, Klaus buttoned his shirt and watched Haruki sit up and run a hand through his hair, leaving strands to riffle back over his forehead. He realised how striking and implausible the entire scene was; a room drenched in afternoon sunlight, a beautiful commander naked in bed, his loyal dog curled up at his feet.

Klaus fought the urge to stay. Haruki fought the urge to ask him to.

A few seconds later, Klaus closed the door gently behind him.

He spent the walk through the courtyard slowly letting that light-filled afternoon drain from him. He steeled himself for something entirely different. Something that felt like he was stepping gently into cold water. Into a river that would sweep him over the fall and into the past.

He got on his bike and headed for the Reizen residence.


	56. Pair of Wolves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!
> 
> Just a quick one-word warning: sex.
> 
> Lots of it. In this chapter and the next one. I think Klaus and I are both making up for the fact that eleven whole chapters went by (eleven!!!) without any sex. And Haruki, bless his heart, is more than willing to oblige, so…
> 
> I also wanted to remind everyone about a small warning I mentioned in the Part 3 preface about sex that is slightly deviant from normal. Then again, you’re all MR fans, so I’m pretty sure you can handle slightly messed-up sex.
> 
> And I wanted to say a huge thank you to the wonderful people who commented on the past few chapters. I've already told some of you how emotional I've been since I finally got around to writing these chapters and I really never anticipated this much love for the boys. You guys are truly the greatest readership a writer could ask for! *sends copious, stifling hugs
> 
> Hope you keep enjoying! Xx

He remembered the boy who had asked for him beneath swaying purple flowers.

Standing beneath those very same flowers, Klaus thought of Taki as he had been then, over twenty years ago, in his long robes and his glinting silver-blue headdress.

He stepped back to lean against the tree trunk. The breeze was gentle on his bare forearms. He heard for the first time in years the familiar sound of Hebe practicing the koto – little, golden drops of sound that seemed to weave the scene together. The wind was a long, continuous sigh that rippled through each swaying vine. The flowers themselves rustled and morphed in the movement, transforming through all possible shades of that soft colour. A colour that Klaus could see even when he closed his eyes. Even in his dreams. Even in a land thousands of miles away.

Over twenty years ago, he had brushed those fluttering arms of wisteria aside and entered that ever-morphing dome created by the flowers. Light filtered through the vines with a bright, hazy edge, cast by the gods themselves so they could watch what was taking place below. And a boy no older than nine had turned to Klaus and asked to be carried to where the flowers grew. He had eyes that made Klaus feel small. As Klaus held him aloft, Taki had reached out to the nearest clump but his arm still wasn’t long enough. And so Klaus reached past him and plucked a tendril for him.

And though it would take another ten years until they met again, and another year after that until Klaus knelt before Taki on a pier, he knew he was bound to that boy, right then and there, beneath the wisteria.

_You have golden eyes. If only you were my knight._

Being away from Haruki and the division, even just for a handful of hours, helped him gain perspective. Haruki seemed a world away. The feelings that had gripped Klaus over the past few weeks and, in a more concentrated burst, the things that he and Haruki had done over the past day, now seemed like something that he had dreamt up by himself.

His life with Taki, on the other hand, seemed to come to life in fresh colours, there in the home where Taki grew up and where Klaus had seen him for the first time. He felt closer to Taki again in a way that brought relief at the same time as pain.

And guilt too. Thoughts of what Taki would say if he knew or saw Klaus’ betrayal. He recalled Taki’s surprising, fiery jealousy that was brought about by Meiji in a hospital room. It was strange how something that had inspired love and gratitude in Klaus back then could make his stomach churn now.

 _I’m sorry, Taki_.

It was the first time in weeks that he had spoken to him, even silently. He had more to say, but he couldn’t form the words. He didn’t deserve forgiveness. There was no defence. There was barely any real rationale beyond thoughts of a warm smile that reached brown, soulful eyes and a laugh that was like a light flickering on in the darkness.

‘Klaus-chan!’

A bright voice pulled Klaus from his thoughts. Beautiful as ever, Midori Reizen swept down the slight incline and past the floral arms that parted for her like a curtain. Klaus remembered how he had thought that the combination of pale skin and obsidian hair was something he would never see again. He had forgotten about Taki’s youngest sister. Her hair flowed about her like a live creature, so black it seemed blue. And her fair skin was radiant.

Klaus pushed away from the tree trunk. He hadn’t seen her for two years since she and the family came to the cottage to visit Taki in his final months. He was a little taken aback by beauty that seemed to have adopted an unreal quality since he had last seen her. Before he had figured out whether or not he ought to bow, Midori had thrown her arms around him and he was immersed in a bewitching lavender scent.

He smiled warmly and realised he ought to have visited much sooner.

‘Last time I saw you under this tree,’ he said as they pulled away, ‘I was lying on the grass and you and Chiyeko jumped on me, remember? I was still recovering from shrapnel wounds and it hurt like nothing else.’

‘You’re lying!’ Midori said, laughing and mortified at the same time.

‘Honest to God.’

Taki’s eyes, almost exactly, but a smile that was entirely her own. And it faltered just a little as she stared up at him.

‘It’s so good to see you, Klaus-chan,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Ogura said who it was! Sorry it took me so long, my lessons go on forever sometimes.’

‘That’s alright. It took me a lot longer than you, really.’

‘Well, you’re here now.’

And their eyes met over the sorrow, the loss, that they had shared and felt as one.

Before he could say another word, the wisteria arms rustled again and Klaus looked over Midori’s shoulder. And, for several seconds, he refused to believe whom he was looking at.

_‘Rudi?’_

Klaus wasn’t sure if he was more startled by the fact that it was Rudi or the fact that he was wearing a long navy kimono and an expression that was far more assured than Klaus remembered.

‘What in God's name are you doing here?’

‘Oh,’ said Midori, with a wide smile and, to Klaus’ surprise, a dusting of pink on her cheeks. ‘Rudi’s going be knighted later on this year.’

Klaus didn't understand.

‘Knighted?’

‘Yep.’

‘By whom?’

‘By me.’

‘What?’

‘Rudi’s going to be my knight,’ Midori explained with exaggerated patience, still smiling broadly.

Klaus stared. ‘Why?’

Midori laughed.

‘Klaus-chan! Probably the same reason why Onii-chan made you his knight.’

‘I sure as hell hope not,’ he said, before he could stop himself. He glanced sharply at Rudi. Though he was still struggling to process the news, Midori’s answer managed to inspire a visceral protectiveness. 

‘What does that mean?’ said Midori after a pause, amused and confused.

‘Nothing,’ Klaus said as Rudi approached but kept a respectful distance, hands behind his back.

Klaus couldn’t get over the sight of the tanned westerner, standing tall and sure in the straight lines of his kimono with his fair hair neatly combed. He remembered the gangly boy from the country who had always been shy and unsure and rough around the edges.

‘Rudi’s going to be your knight,’ he summarised, still finding it difficult to believe.

‘Yep,’ Midori confirmed. ‘Well, we have to wait until I turn sixteen, so it won’t be until the end of summer. But Douman’s let Rudi live with us until then. Rudi’s been here for almost half a year and he’s already learned so much, he’s really very good at a lot of things! And he’s learned the language, well he’s _mostly_ learned the language because he’s still learning the kanji, which even I struggle with to be honest. And we still mostly speak Saxon together so it’s good practice for me too…’

Whatever language they spoke, Klaus had a good idea which of them would be doing most of the talking.

Rudi’s silence and his bright blue eyes, steady and unwavering, suddenly made Klaus think of Kolya. Which, in turn, made him think of Haruki, though Haruki hadn’t been far from his thoughts that day.

He tried to refocus when there was a pause in Midori’s monologue.

‘But –’ he began. ‘When did you two even –?’

Midori laughed again, her laughter like bells, and took Klaus’ arm, promising to explain everything over tea.

Hebe and Chiyeko, twenty-one and seventeen, were far more demure than their younger sister when they greeted Klaus. Sumi folded his hands into her warm, wrinkled ones. Klaus thought he glimpsed tears in her eyes, like he had seen back at the cottage. Yura, former priestess, bustled about the house with her three-year-old son, Soseki, on her hip. Klaus smiled at the dark, serious eyes that watched him suspiciously from over his mother’s shoulder. It seemed Taki’s nephew threatened to take after Taki himself.

Soseki, however, wouldn’t share the Reizen name. He was Douman Tachibana’s son, after all. The emperor’s grandson, Klaus realised with a start.

‘Where’s your husband these days?’ Klaus asked as a maid placed tea on the table and Yura sat across from him.

‘To be honest, I can’t even be sure anymore,’ Yura said. ‘Douman’s always busy with work on the estate. We’re lucky if he gets home before sundown.’

She glanced up and caught the look in his eye.

‘He has nothing more to do with his father,’ she said, her voice both defiant and imploring. ‘That’s not where he is. He hasn’t stepped foot in the capital since we got married. He’s been so ashamed of everything his father's done. You should have seen his face when Tachibana declared war. And one of Douman's best friends, a journalist, disappeared just last month and no one has the guts to look into it. Can you believe it? It's all just awful. Douman doesn't even read the newspaper anymore. He doesn't trust anything that's written in there...’

She trailed off with a troubled sigh.

‘Well, I can’t imagine the emperor’s happy with his youngest son either, then,’ Klaus inferred.

‘He hasn’t acknowledged us even once, not even when Douman and I got married,’ Yura said. ‘Douman’s practically been disowned. Which suits us just fine. Doesn’t it, Sose?’ She grinned at little Soseki in her lap, who turned to her solemnly. Though he didn’t return her smile, his dark eyes softened with affection.

Also kneeling along the table were Midori and Rudi, who sat side-by-side and projected a kind of closeness that Klaus recognised; one that was borne from having been in one another’s company for a long time. Rudi was exactly Haruki’s age, as Klaus recalled. Meaning nine years separated him from the youngest Reizen daughter.

He saw, in even the smallest of Rudi’s looks and gestures, a kind of muted worship of his young mistress-to-be that made Klaus smile reluctantly.

Midori filled him in about how he and Rudi had spent time together back in the west. How Rudi had taught her to ride on Wolfsbane almost up to a full canter and how he showed her the various gadgets in his little workshop on his farm and how she had even learned to put a basic motor together thanks to him. Klaus listened, fascinated and still a little incredulous.

A couple of hours later, Yura went away to put Soseki down for his nap and the younger daughters were called back to their private lessons. Before she bade Klaus farewell, Sumi quietly asked Klaus if he’d been to see Taki’s shrine yet.

Klaus felt a small surge of guilt.

‘Not yet,’ he admitted.

Sumi nodded with a quiet, motherly reassurance that doubled Klaus’ guilt.

He walked with Midori and Rudi over the boardwalks towards the far side of the residence where Midori’s sensei awaited. He listened happily to Midori chatting away about her lessons and how much things had changed since the war began – the annoying drills, the bunkers being built, the heightened security. She changed topics at the speed of light and the other two were pleased to follow along behind her lively train of thought.

A slender figure and a sure step. Features that were poised but surrounded by an animated veil of hair. Fragile strength. Klaus mused on how the Reizens were full of contradictions.

In the middle of a rare but comfortable lull in Klaus and Midori’s conversation, Rudi finally spoke up.

‘Klaus,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you see Haruki often?’

Hearing his name sent a small shock through Klaus. He turned to Rudi in surprise.

‘Haruki? Yeah, I – every day, more or less. Why?’

‘Oh, I forgot to ask about Haruki-san!’ Midori chimed in. ‘I heard everyone at the division loves him like they loved Onii-chan. Is that true?’ Before Klaus could reply, she thought of something else. ‘I’ve been hoping to meet him, actually, so I can thank him.’

‘What for?’

‘Apparently he gave Rudi some advice about knighthood a few years ago.’ She smiled at her knight-to-be. ‘It seems Rudi agreed to it without knowing what he was getting into. I mean, I suppose I did sort of spring the question on him right before I left…’

Rudi blushed. It was the first time Klaus saw a flicker of the boy he had known for years back in the west.

‘But Rudi says Haruki-san explained things to him, I think, and – oh!’ They were within eye-shot of the small study where the girls took private lessons. A strict-looking woman waited pointedly by the door. ‘Oh no, I must be late. Sensei looks mad,’ Midori said with a chuckle. She stopped to embrace Klaus once more. ‘Come to the knighthood ceremony at the end of summer, okay? And tell Haruki-san to come too.’

He realised a few seconds later that he had been left alone on the boardwalk with Rudi. They exchanged a look. It was strange that they should have been neighbours for so many years in their quiet corner of the west and yet now, without the buffering presence of a princess from the east, of all things, there was only awkwardness between them.

‘So…’ Klaus said, for lack of anything to say. ‘Knighthood, huh?’

Rudi nodded.

Klaus suddenly remembered the first time Rudi had seen Taki all those years ago. The blush and the quickly averted eyes. He understood now, for sure, that it had been nothing more than bashfulness and benign curiosity. It made Klaus chuckle quietly.

‘I had you pegged all wrong,’ he realised.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

He also remembered a half-baked theory he had relayed to Taki. Midori and Heinrich. Rudi and Haruki. He couldn’t have been more off the mark.

 _You wouldn’t notice anything even if it knocked on the front door and announced itself,_ Claudia told him.

He thought of how Haruki had touched his face and kissed him. He wondered how long he had missed the signs. It was surreal to think that Haruki felt anything for him at all. He couldn’t understand why. Or when it began.

And then he realised he had never once thought to ask Taki when exactly he had started thinking about Klaus in that way, back in Luckenwalde. Which moment had catalysed everything. Whether it was, in fact, a moment or whether it was more complicated than that. Whether he had felt it outside of his own body like Klaus had. And for how long Taki had kept it hidden before Klaus asked to sit beside him on his bed. Klaus had never once asked. And now he would never know.

He felt the talons sinking in just a fraction. He tried to cast his mind elsewhere.

‘So Haruki… gave you advice, did he? Back when you met him at the cottage?’

‘Yeah. He explained to me what knighthood would mean.’

‘You could have asked me,’ Klaus pointed out lightly. ‘Could have just yelled the question over the fence pretty much anytime.’

Another slight flush. ‘I know…’

Klaus recalled something Claudia had said about Rudi having always been afraid of him. He smiled.

‘What did your father have to say about all this?’

‘He’s – he was… upset,’ said Rudi quietly. ‘But he said he understood. He said he had a feeling I would leave the farm eventually.’

He was definitely alone in that prediction, Klaus thought privately.

‘But I wasn’t sure about leaving him,’ Rudi continued. ‘Or whether I’d be any good. You know, as a knight. But Haruki made me feel better. About… everything.’

There was a small pause. Klaus stared at the sloping lawn beyond the boardwalk railing.

‘Yeah, that sounds like him,’ he said, a little wryly. He felt an odd, gentle pride.

He turned to look at Rudi and thought of how much life had changed for him. And how much it was about to change.

‘I’m glad you’re here for her. For Midori.’ When Rudi seemed nonplussed, Klaus tried to explain what he meant. He thought of the past few weeks. ‘Shit’s already hit the fan with the _Hitobito_. And it’s probably only going to get worse. And I'm guessing you’ve heard about the kind of weapons we’re playing with now, right? Us and the west?’

Rudi nodded gravely.

‘Not that you can do much if we’re facing the wrong end of a nuclear missile but… it makes me feel better to know someone’s watching over the Reizens,’ Klaus said with a small smile.

Rudi looked surprised and grateful.

After a short silence, it looked like he was working up the nerve to speak. Klaus remembered that look from when he had left Wolfsbane with Rudi over a year ago.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

Rudi hesitated. ‘It’s just that there are… so many rules. And vows. Involved with knighthood.’

Klaus raised his eyebrows in stoic acknowledgment. ‘Preaching to the choir.’

‘I’m worried that I… that we… might not be able to uphold… all of them.’

And Rudi gave himself away with yet another deep flush.

It was only an insinuation, and a weak one, but it was enough for Klaus to feel another surge of indignation on Midori’s behalf. But he sighed and battened it down. There was no way he could disapprove, after all, with any degree of integrity. So he thought of Taki and tried to give Rudi an answer.

‘The only thing that matters is Midori,’ he said slowly. ‘If you know you’ve done right by her, nothing else matters – not the people you offend or the rules you break or anything else. If you’ve… if you’ve done right by her…’

And right there was something else Klaus would never know. Whether, despite all of his mistakes and transgressions, he had done right by his master.

Klaus trailed off but Rudi, who seemed to hang on to his every word, nodded firmly.

‘Thank you,’ he said after a pause, though neither could be sure exactly what Rudi was thanking him for.

And yet, when their eyes met, it spoke of something that few others in the world would have been able to understand. That bond. That burden. That privilege and honour and sacrifice. The one that came with giving up everything – their past and their future – for a single person.

Klaus left him hovering near the doorway through which Midori had disappeared.

* * *

His replacement bike waited for him at the start of the long driveway out of the grounds. It was leaner and older than the one he had abandoned in Hokane near the broken hull of Murakumo and whose fate he didn’t know. There was something about his bike and Murakumo being lost in the same moment and in the same place that seemed somehow fitting. If nothing else seemed fitting about the last few weeks, at least that one insignificant thing did, Klaus thought tiredly as he trudged over the yellow gravel.

His next stop was the shrine. But when he swung his leg over the bike, he knew already that he wouldn’t be going there. Despite his own promise to himself, he couldn’t picture climbing the steps to the little green cave of canopy. He didn’t feel worthy of the serene and ponderous silence of the shrine where Taki had joined his ancestors. And, quite simply, he didn't feel ready to accept the fact that Taki was there.

He had been trying to find Taki his whole life. He had tried to find him before they met, when his grandfather first spoke to him about the scent of the rose. He had tried to find Taki, endlessly, even after they met. And, over those eight years, he had gotten so close.

And now, here he was, still trying to find Taki. He had used Haruki as a temporary balm over a wound that would never heal. He had used Haruki to indulge in his basest of instincts. There was no other way in which Haruki Yamamoto fit into the saga of his life. A life that had spanned love and loss and war and peace and east and west. A balm. A guilty indulgence. A way of trying to find Taki even though he knew Taki was lost for good. That was all it was. And he knew – he _knew_ – it meant he had to stop whatever it was that they had started.

But his bike droned on. He rode past the turn that would take him to the shrine. He rode until he reached the compound.

By then, evening had fallen and the division was coated in a sombre violet hue. And when he pulled into the square, he saw that he must have arrived only a minute or two behind the convoy from the capital, where Haruki had just been.

The commander stepped out of the jeep and turned with a surprised smile – one that was a little nervous but still managed to take up his entire face – and caused something warm to pool in Klaus’ chest.

That warmth quickly gave way to something else. Even through the gathering gloom of dusk, all it took was the look in Haruki’s eye and everything they had done only a few hours ago in a sun-drenched bedroom came back to him. Everything they had done on the floor of Haruki's office only the previous night. He found himself wondering again about what it all meant for Haruki – why he had given himself to Klaus like that so suddenly and willingly. It still didn’t make sense.

He knew they had to stop whatever they had started.

He knew it even when he and Haruki fell into bed less than ten minutes later, lips locked and hands fumbling beneath clothes.

* * *

Haruki hadn’t been able to concentrate in his meeting with the capital. It had taken a few choice words from General Nakamori for him to lift himself out of a stupor consisting entirely of gold hair and gold eyes and tanned skin. And now, again in bed, pressed beneath Klaus for the third time in less than a day, he felt like he had risen from the dream for a few tinny hours before being plunged back in.

Earlier that afternoon, he remembered only after Klaus left that he had asked for leave to visit the Reizen residence. Haruki had spent the next few hours nursing a new, prickling guilt over how much he had betrayed Taki – Taki who had asked Haruki to summon Klaus. He had tried to figure out, in a moment of slight desperation, whether it had been he or Klaus who had really made the first move where it counted. He realised, hopelessly, that he couldn't be sure. But either way, it didn’t matter. Klaus wasn't his. Klaus had never been his because he already belonged, and would always belong, to Taki.

So he didn’t know what to think when Klaus returned from the Reizen residence and pulled up behind their convoy. But when Klaus fixed him with a look, when Haruki dismissed his men including Kolya at the doorway to the building and left Kaiser on the other side of the bedroom door again, he knew that whatever spell had been cast wasn’t done with them yet.

Once they were both free of clothes, Klaus ran his hands over Haruki’s long, bare legs and pulled them around him, trying to take his time. His cock pressed hard against its mark without breaching. Klaus relished the short, breathy moans and the way Haruki clutched the sheets beneath him, knuckles white. He mustered all of his strength to stay where he was, to revel in Haruki’s tremulous, dazed anticipation. He kissed and nipped along his neck. A rogue slip of his tongue along Haruki’s ear surprised them both; Haruki’s entire body shivered.

Intrigued, Klaus bit the edge of his ear again and the licked along the outer ridges. Haruki’s back and neck arched. Another shiver raced through him, even stronger than before.

‘Mmmh… Klaus –’

Klaus’ throaty chuckle made Haruki feel weak. Each time Klaus' tongue or teeth played around his ear, a wave of heat would shoot from that point of contact and concentrate in his cock. His ears had always been sensitive but never quite like this. His nerves had never stood to attention like they did now, when Klaus held him down and his cock and tongue searched for ways into Haruki's body. He wanted, he waited, to be filled completely again. He wanted Klaus to be everywhere and to command everything, every piece. He wanted –  
  
The exact nature of what he wanted eluded him then, especially when Klaus pushed in and made him cry out and made all other thoughts peripheral to the fact that Klaus was devouring him again, turning him over onto his stomach, pressing him flat and fucking him like that for long, agonising minutes before turning him back around. He felt Klaus bite him between thrusts, again slightly too hard, on his shoulder and around his nipples. What Haruki wanted from Klaus exactly, when they were like that, would elude him for another few weeks.  
  
And when Klaus came, he felt it fill him, that evidence of Klaus’ desire. Evidence of Klaus having chosen him and marked him. And it was enough to make him come.

Klaus watched Haruki come only seconds after he did and felt him squeeze out every drop from Klaus, his muscles contracting deviously, and when the mind-numbing effects of his climax receded, Klaus was a little surprised to find he was still buried inside Haruki and still hard. It was the first time he had ever remained stiff after coming.

He blinked down between their bodies and his cock twitched. Haruki, to his dazed disbelief, felt it too.

And Klaus’ gaze almost made his toes curl.

‘Not done yet, Wolfpup,’ he warned.

A single thrust and they both groaned, both of them sensitive and thrumming. Though Haruki's cock was softening since his orgasm, feeling Klaus picking up the pace yet again was quickly bringing him back to life.

After they both came a second time, Haruki on all fours and Klaus’ chest pressed against his back, Klaus pulled out and turned him around. Once Haruki lay back, Klaus bent low and kissed Haruki’s left hip bone. Haruki only peripherally felt it amidst the pulsing waves of his climax and the places on his body that stung from Klaus’ hands and teeth, but it registered somewhere – that Klaus had kissed his left hip bone tenderly. And he felt Klaus fall onto the bed beside him like he had done earlier than afternoon, this time on his front, breathing hard with his cheek on Haruki’s pillow.

 _Stay,_ Haruki suddenly thought, a thought that took shape clearly despite his state. _Don’t run again. Stay, just for a bit…_

Klaus opened his eyes halfway and the bright gold of his eyes, even when he was exhausted, was enough for Haruki’s stomach to lurch, just slightly.

Then Klaus chuckled again. He realised that after almost two years of never having touched another person, here he was now, unable to remember how many times he had come in the past twenty-four hours.

‘We’re like a pair of wolves in heat,’ he murmured.

After a second, Haruki laughed softly. He was still caught up in how powerful Klaus felt behind him and on top of him right as they came.

Sated, and in fact, feeling as though he had feasted and gorged, the hunger trickled from Klaus until he was able to see Haruki clearly again. Haruki's head was turned to the side, mouth slightly open. His chest beginning to rise and fall steadily. It all stirred up the usual cocktail of guilt and incredulousness.

For Haruki, the disappointment he felt when Klaus slowly heaved himself up and sat on the edge of the bed was outdone by his annoyance at himself for feeling disappointed at all.

Klaus eased his pants back over his hips where he sat, facing the door, and wondered about the silence. The warm night air invited itself through the window, carrying a muggy hint of rain to come. He wondered whether he should bring it up. Whether they should try talking about it. Whatever it was they had stumbled into.

He tried to recall his life before Taki. There had been times in his early twenties – many times – when he had kissed her, whoever she might have been, on the neck and shoulder and smiled and simply left. They might have shared a mutual friend or they might have shared a few drinks that very night or they might, on rare occasions, have shared similar nights like that in the past. But they shared nothing more. A flame that flared and then flickered out. And then, after that, came Taki. And now…

On cue, Kaiser whined at the door. The corners of Klaus’ lips twitched.

Now, he was caught somewhere in the middle. In a place that made very little sense. A balm. A guilty indulgence. A way of trying to find Taki even though he knew Taki was lost for good. He heard Haruki sit up behind him. He wondered how much he was taking advantage of a cadet who had once looked up to him.

‘Listen, kid,’ he said.

Haruki’s heart skipped a beat, both at the low, foreboding tone and the hoarseness of his voice. It seemed strange that he was now able to recognise the sound of Klaus’ voice after sex.

‘I don’t…’ Klaus struggled. ‘I don’t know what this –’

_I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing._

Haruki understood.

‘It’s okay.’ He sat up a little more and tried to comb through the confusion of the past week since Klaus had kissed him in Hokane. ‘It’s okay, I – I don’t know either.’

It was part of the truth. He knew how he felt – it was the one thing he knew for sure. But he had no idea about anything else.

Their eyes met in the lull. Captain, commander, cadet; all ten years rolled into that one moment.

Klaus turned away again and rubbed the back of his neck. He remembered how he had wanted to remain behind in that room earlier that day, in the bright afternoon light that streamed onto warm sheets. But he didn’t. And he knew he shouldn’t stay that night either. But for the moment, caught between worlds, he remained where he was and asked about an issue that was almost as pressing.

‘How’d it go in the capital?’

Haruki’s eyes lingered on the bare muscles of Klaus’ back and shoulders, cast in bronze by the lamp on the nightstand. It looked like Klaus had been sculpted there, exactly where he was, by a careful hand.

He reached for his clothes and tried to switch gears.

‘Not great,’ he said. His face darkened. ‘Headquarters wants us to retaliate _.’_

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere the _Hitobito_ might be weak. Rural towns, mostly. They’re still strong in urban centres like Hokane so we’re not hitting there for a while.’

Klaus sighed in frustration. He turned around to lean back against the footboard.

‘I figured that was coming.’ He rifled through the pants he had just pulled on and found his cigarettes. ‘Why’d Nakamori wait so long to order a retaliation? It’s been weeks since the attacks.’ He lit up before he realised what he was doing. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Haruki said absently. He hesitated. He had been dreading having to tell Klaus the next piece of information.

‘It's taken a while because they’re outfitting all the divisions with… with new weapons.’

Klaus glanced up from his first drag.

‘Short-range missiles,’ Haruki recited dully. ‘Artillery shells. Tank artillery. Bombs. Even landmines.’ He paused. ‘All nuclear.’

Klaus was speechless for a moment.

Haruki pressed on. ‘Nakamori knows how the commanders all feel about it, not to mention the public, so… he’s saying it’s still a reserve measure. Only to be used in rural towns to scare the insurgents in the cities. Make them surrender. But… he also said that any soldier refusing to use them when ordered will face treason.’ Another pause. ‘And summary execution without court martial.’

Klaus rose to his feet swiftly, blowing smoke from his mouth in an angry gust.

‘That fucking… short-sighted prick…’

Haruki sat on the bed, partially dressed, watching him almost nervously, as though the tactical nuclear weapons they were being told to use was an affront to Klaus more than anyone else.

And in a way, it was.

‘There are civilians in those towns,’ Klaus said, his voice low, pacing with a slow, broiling anger. ‘More civilians than rebels. Hundreds of them that never evacuated.’

‘I know,’ Haruki said, eyes downcast.

In the palace war room, after Nakamori had delivered their new offensive strategy, Haruki felt for the first time the need to take off the mantle. To let others – someone else, anyone else – take up the impossible new duty that was handed to him. To absolve himself of all responsibility.

It was the only thing he knew he couldn’t do.

And even though Klaus was pacing angrily beyond the footboard, he was suddenly grateful that he was still there in the room.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

Klaus felt a twinge at the new tone in Haruki’s voice. He looked at him properly – half-dressed, still slightly flushed, eyes focused on a place on the bedspread. The brow and eyes that were so similar to Taki’s when Taki had faced decisions that also seemed impossible.

‘Even if it means they’ll give me a blindfold and a post,’ Haruki said resignedly. ‘I don’t care, I don’t think I can –’

‘Hey –’

Talk of execution made Klaus’ pulse surge. He stopped pacing and walked to the edge of the bed where Haruki was sitting.

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘I just mean –’

‘You think standing up to the emperor by yourself and getting killed will do anything? As soon as you’re gone they’ll appoint some patsy to take your place and do whatever the emperor wants. You being a martyr won’t make any difference.’

Haruki was silent for a moment. Klaus watched him, feeling a little helpless. He sighed and sat heavily on the bed beside him, one hand holding the cigarette to his mouth.

‘That reminds me of something you said back at the cottage,’ said Haruki quietly. ‘You said nothing we do ends up making any difference anyway.’

‘I said that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘God, I’m a downer.’

Haruki laughed before he could stop himself. The sound make Klaus look round again, this time with a faint smile.

They heard the soft patter of rain, though it was too dark to see the drops. Klaus didn’t recall seeing a single cloud in the sky that day. He thought of the walk back to his shed. His spirits, which had hovered an inch above the ground when Haruki laughed, quickly found the floor again.

‘We’ll prove me wrong,’ he said, quietly but assuredly; more assuredly than he felt. ‘We’ll figure something out.’

Haruki gave him a small, grateful smile for the platitude. As he watched Klaus take another pull on his cigarette, he gathered the courage to ask.

‘How was it? At... the Reizen residence?’ he asked gingerly.

Klaus took a few moments before he spoke.

‘It’s like what you said about visiting Ao’s parents. It was good to see them.’

He took a breath, on the point of saying something else. Something that was vague and amorphous. He thought of Rudi and Midori. He thought of little Soseki. He had had this sense that life went on. That time had stopped all of them in one sense when Taki left them, but in a more important sense, it had kept going. For them, anyway, even if it hadn’t for Klaus. For them, the world had kept spinning.

It was something that Taki himself had often thought in his final few weeks, though he had never found the words to express it to Klaus; the despair it gave him, at first, and then later the indelible hope.

And though Klaus was seeing it now for himself, he was caught, like Taki was, without the words with which to express it. And so he glanced at Haruki and kept those thoughts to himself.

He thought of something much lighter.

‘I’ve been asked to pass a message along to you.’

‘To me?’

‘From Midori Reizen and her knight-to-be. You’ve been invited to the knighthood ceremony.’ He took in Haruki’s look of surprise. ‘Whatever advice you gave Rudi years ago apparently helped those two lovebirds somehow.’ A pause. ‘I assume that’s what they are. Not that I like to imagine it.’

Haruki smiled. He thought of Rudi for the first time in a long time and was glad that it sounded like he had found happiness.

‘So you don’t have a choice now,’ Klaus said. ‘And neither do I, come to think of it. We both have to make it to the end of summer to watch Rudi get knighted or we’ll be letting Midori down. So no more talk of martyrdom. Okay?’

Another soft chuckle.

‘Alright.’

And before Klaus knew it, he had reached out, almost reflexively, and run his hand through Haruki’s hair. It was intended as an affectionate move; something he had done even when Haruki was a cadet.

But the eyes that looked round in mild surprise snapped him back to the present. Klaus' hand paused for a moment before moving to the side of Haruki's neck, where his thumb brushed the warm skin beneath Haruki’s ear.

And with a quick inhale he took his hand back and noticed he was still sans shirt. He got up again and walked to the other side of the bed where he had discarded it. The rain was picking up outside.

Haruki still felt the large, calloused palm on the side of his neck. The words that came out of him were almost as reflexive as Klaus' touch.

‘You – you could stay.’

Klaus straightened and looked at him.

‘I mean, it’s raining,’ Haruki said, willing his pulse to soften. ‘You don’t have to walk back if you don’t… want to.’

The rain drummed gently, peacefully, in the few seconds that ensued. Klaus remembered the nights he had asked Taki in that very room whether he could stay. He remembered how Taki had, sometimes, reluctantly allowed it.

He imagined, for a moment, climbing back into bed beside Haruki. The thought only lasted a moment; only as far as it took for him to remember that the pillows and sheets, even when they had been drenched in afternoon sunlight, no longer carried the scent of the rose.

‘I’ll let you get some sleep,’ he said.

Haruki didn’t know whether the gentleness or casualness of Klaus’ tone got to him more.

‘Okay,’ he said.

* * *

_ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATER_

Haruki discovered, to his eternal disbelief and bemusement, that the notion of their being a pair of wolves in heat wasn’t far off the mark.

It happened every day, without fail, and almost without either of them having willed it.

Every day the intensity would escalate, again almost without their control.

And every day, Klaus would leave shortly afterwards.

Haruki carried Klaus’ marks on his skin, beneath his clothes. They would sting if his clothes moved against his body abrasively, particularly around his stiff collar or his belt. It was like he was feeling Klaus all the time, even when he was performing his duties as commander. He could feel Klaus all the time, as though that was what Klaus had intended whenever he marked him. And he could see Klaus on his skin, even when he was alone in his room, when he glanced at his collarbones and torso in the mirror.

His stomach somersaulted whenever he caught Klaus’ eye from across the table and remembered something that had happened the previous night or just an hour or two ago. It was something that had folded seamlessly into the schedules of their days, though oftentimes this was because it didn’t pay any attention to schedule at all.

They found time between meetings, before briefings, after drills and training sessions, and always after sorties when they could still feel the adrenaline rush.

One afternoon, after a lunch break where neither had found time for lunch and where they had given themselves just enough time to get to the afternoon briefing, Klaus moved past Haruki where he was standing fully dressed by his bureau, gathering some files. On impulse, Klaus took a step back and pressed himself against Haruki’s back and licked his ear.

The reaction he got was both expected and not. He expected the shiver and the flush that reached Haruki's ear. But he also expected Haruki to turn and make a breathy protest about how the briefing was only minutes away. Instead, when Haruki turned, the already-dazed look of lust made Klaus harden against his back.

He kissed Haruki and pushed him forwards into the bureau. And, as Haruki moaned into their kiss, Klaus felt him push back against his cock.

‘You want it?’ he said.

The hoarseness of his voice made Haruki’s cock stiffen painfully fast.

‘Nngh… yes…’ he whispered.

Klaus’ mind was spinning again. He wondered if he would ever get used to hearing it. He dragged both hands down Haruki’s sides and waist, cloying hard, and then slipped one past his jacket and into his pants. He held Haruki’s cock firmly and was rewarded with Haruki arching his back against him and groaning.

‘Tell me what you want,’ Klaus said gently, his words rumbling and gentle like the onsets of an earthquake.

Haruki’s body fired up in anticipation.

‘You,’ he said between unsteady breaths.

Klaus bent him forwards suddenly, with a hand in his hair still pulling his head back. Haruki gasped in surprise and felt Klaus’ erection straining against him through both of their clothes.

‘Which part of me?’ Klaus demanded in a hiss, putting his mouth close to Haruki’s ear.

Haruki’s flush deepened and he almost moaned again. ‘Your cock.’

Klaus grinned. ‘Good answer.’

When they tried to float back to reality afterwards, both still upright against the bureau, Klaus realised they were several minutes late for the briefing and that Haruki now needed to clean up before he left the room. He realised that the least he could have done was to come somewhere other than inside him.

Before he had time to apologise, there was a knock on the door followed by Kolya making sure he was alright and apologising for having left his post at the entrance to the building. Haruki dismissed him in a voice that was only slightly breathless.

‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ Klaus said, his voice low.

Haruki nodded weakly.

Sometimes Klaus wouldn't leave immediately. Sometimes he would spend long minutes hovering over Haruki's body, holding Haruki's hands down in a firm, always slightly too hard grip above his head, and run his lips and tongue over Haruki's skin, over his nipples and the firm muscles of his stomach and he'd let go of Haruki's hands so he could keep kissing his way down Haruki's hips, parting them, licking the flesh inside his thigh and coming back up, as though he was confirming, piece by piece, that Haruki's body belonged to him. He was rarely devouring in those times. The marks left by Klaus' mouth all over Haruki's body were always made either in the middle of sex or immediately before. Klaus' actions afterwards felt distinctly to Haruki like the slow, simmering warmth of appraisal rather than the intense heat of marking ownership.

He had discovered certain proclivities in Klaus, and vice versa. He had noticed that Klaus had particular fondness for Haruki’s hair, the clefts in his collarbones and, for some reason, his left hipbone, to which Klaus would return often to kiss or nip at with his teeth. And Klaus had discovered, early on, the little trigger points of Haruki’s ears.

And though Haruki couldn’t be sure, he found that whenever he brushed his lips across Klaus’ neck beneath his jaw it would cause Klaus to pause for a moment and, once or twice, he could have sworn that he felt a slight shiver pass through Klaus’ huge body. He would return there whenever he could just to hear the way a low growl would emanate from Klaus’ throat in response. And to relish the speed at which he would then be thrown onto his back and pinned.

Klaus’ guilt grew in many ways; guilt over taking advantage of Haruki, no matter how willing the kid seemed, guilt over Taki, and guilt, more specifically, over the way his body responded to the small things Haruki did.

Each time Haruki kissed or nuzzled at Klaus’ neck, it awoke a forgotten part of him. He remembered how he had guiltily sidled closer to Taki while he slept to feel his hair or his soft breath against that part of his neck. Whenever Haruki’s lips found him there, he hung his head slightly and felt his mind swim.

There was also one warm dusk where Klaus was lying on his side, trying to catch his breath, and Haruki took advantage of the moment to let his eyes drink in the sight of Klaus’ long body stretched across his bed. He saw the light scar on Klaus’ shin that he had gotten in Hokane. He sat up slightly and reached down to touch it. The scar wouldn’t last long, not like the one on his face. But he felt guilty for it in the same way that Taki had felt guilty for all of Klaus’ scars, the ones that were visible and the ones that weren't. Haruki's fingertips brushed the light golden hair there and felt the firmness of the muscle.

Klaus opened his eyes partway. He felt fingers on his shin. It felt comforting and strange at the same time. It was somewhere that no one had ever touched him before.

Before he got off the bed, he kissed Haruki on the shoulder and hip – the left hip that had been exposed when he saw Haruki sleeping on a bench in the groundskeeper’s little corner.

* * *

They went on sorties whenever headquarters ordered it. Their targets were towns and villages in rural areas where the _Hitobito_ had taken control. Tanks and convoys trundled loudly and jarringly past sleepy paddy fields that shone like huge mirrors in the sun. Klaus’ bike zipped alongside. Even from within the roar of the bike’s engine, the serenity of the countryside made him remember the golden notes of Hebe’s koto: a memory that was promptly drowned out when they rolled into the rebel-controlled town and tried to take it back.

All three sorties were a success. The rebels’ manpower and firepower didn’t match their counterparts in Hokane and were no match at all for the Fifteenth. Besides that, the men were spurred on by the memory of their commander’s words to them in the aftermath of the defeat in Hokane and ensured that the strikes against the rebels took place swiftly. In all three sorties, it took less than half an hour before _Hitobito_ leaders were taken into custody and town officials reinstated. In the end, though more civilians fell than Haruki could stomach, they didn’t have to resort to the new arsenal of weapons that they were forced to have on reserve.

He praised his men warmly over the radio. But back at the division, Haruki reported their success to headquarters in a tone that was dry and brittle.

Hokane, and other urban centres, remained under rebel control. Haruki dreaded the day when they would be ordered to take it back.

The afternoon of the third sortie found Klaus beside his shed, trying to change the front tire of his bike. Though he didn’t want to worry the commander, who had ordered him not to go on ahead before the infantry unit, he had had a tense brush with the front line of rebels in the few seconds before his grenade scattered them. Several bullets had glanced off the bike’s body, one of them puncturing his tire. He had made it through the rest of the mission riding on a flat.

But it hadn’t escaped Haruki’s attention.

The past two weeks – the peaks and the depths and the anxieties – all churned in Haruki when he faced his men in the square for a training session.

It was the day after their third successful mission. Not a single soldier from the division had been lost. Though everyone’s spirits were high, a few of the men, including Klaus, noticed that there was something a little different about their commander that afternoon. He seemed almost distracted and he smiled a little less.

Though Klaus normally would have preferred to avoid watching in on Haruki’s sparring sessions, he had observed the way Haruki had reported their latest victory to headquarters. He saw the look on his face when the estimates for civilian casualties had come in. And he recognised it from a time long past.

And so he had come to the square when Haruki called on the first infantry unit. Kaiser sat by his feet at the edge of the square. Klaus had been content, at first, to remain where he was with his hand stroking the scruff of Kaiser’s neck. After a while, when Klaus saw that Haruki was out of sorts, he let out a sigh. Kaiser glanced up at him curiously. Klaus then stepped past Kaiser and Kolya and onto the square where he challenged the commander to a spar.

The air was suddenly pulsing with an old excitement. It had been months since the men saw their commander face off with the captain.

Up against Klaus, Haruki was forced to focus. But even as he ducked Klaus’ fast, heavy strikes and whirled and weaved to avoid him, his mind was still playing the images of the past two weeks like it was on a broken reel.

The civilians that lay dead by his hand.

The weapons stockpiled in the division that weighed in the back of his mind.

Klaus sitting beside him in bed, smoking, talking about Midori and Rudi.

Klaus kissing him as his cock carved into Haruki’s body.

Klaus leaving his bedroom time and time again, sometimes throwing a wink over his shoulder.

Klaus disobeying his order not to go on ahead.

Klaus taking on the front line of rebels by himself.

Klaus.

And suddenly with a deft side-swipe, Klaus was put on the defensive. He saw an unfamiliar look in the kid’s eye which almost threw him off balance.

Haruki imagined bullets glancing off Klaus’ bike, close enough to hit and puncture one of his tires. Meaning it had been close enough to hit him. He imagined, again, Klaus lying dead beside his bike, his golden eyes open and unseeing.

The shinai was knocked from Klaus’ hand and Klaus stumbled back. He crouched low to retrieve it and underestimated Haruki’s speed. He barely had time to turn back before he found himself staring up at the end of Haruki’s shinai.

Haruki barely even registered it. He was still caught somewhere in the sidereel of images which was constantly punctuated by that image of vacant, lifeless golden eyes – so much so that he could barely see the ones before him then, the ones that glinted with surprise and a hint of something else.

And then it caught up. And he realised he was staring down at Klaus, whom he had defeated for the very first time, and that the men were hooting and clapping somewhere nearby.

He barely remembered dismissing the men or walking through the compound or leaving Kolya by the entrance. He barely remembered anything before he and Klaus were alone in the hallway outside his room, Klaus pressing him hard against the wall, hands gripped above his head, and Klaus’ tongue his mouth.

That afternoon, when Klaus held his legs up to his chest and pushed himself firmly and swiftly into his body, Haruki felt as though Klaus’ cock was reaching places further than it really was. Like Klaus had somehow filled his whole body.

When Klaus let go of his hands, Haruki held on to his back and shoulders, tears welling from the force of thrusts and the raw, tender pleasure of it. He held on guiltily, knowing it was the only time he could hold Klaus so close.

* * *

Klaus turned him over and ran his hands up Haruki’s back, pulling hard at the skin, both the healthy skin and his burn scars. A body that had been marked. A body that had been taken before him. And yet it was his now. The back of Haruki's neck and shoulders still bore faint marks that Klaus had left on him before. He held a hand loosely around Haruki’s throat to feel the moan reverberate through him when he plunged back in.

‘Feel that, kid? Feel how deep you’re taking me?’

‘Yes… yes! Ugh –’

Over the past few weeks, things had escalated in small bursts but Klaus always caught himself in time. He reined in the wolf before he marked Haruki anywhere that would show when he wore his uniform, or before he held Haruki’s face to the pillow for too long, or before he yanked Haruki’s head back by his hair too strongly.

But he slipped up that afternoon.

He cleaved himself over Haruki’s back and rutted into him, into the body that wanted him and welcomed him every time, and felt the need, again to claim him. He sank his teeth far too hard into Haruki’s neck right where it curved into his shoulder. He broke Haruki’s skin and tasted blood.

The sudden, intense pain in his neck made Haruki gasp and buck under Klaus’ hold. Haruki's hand flew to his neck.

And suddenly Klaus had pulled out and backed away in mild shock.

‘Shit…’ he panted. ‘Haruki… I didn’t mean to –’

Despite the sharp pain and the slight shock, all Haruki could think about was the bolt of electricity that had coursed through his body when he felt Klaus bite down.

‘No, it’s okay,’ he said, breathing hard, before the words even had time to materialise in his mind. He held out a hand as though worried Klaus would leave again.

That was when he understood what had eluded him before. He suddenly understood what he wanted from Klaus.

‘Don’t – don’t hold back,’ he said, staring at Klaus with an expression that he could sense was still overcome with need. ‘Do anything you want. Okay? I –’

_I want it all. I'm yours._

He had wanted Klaus for so long that he craved to see him for everything he was. Every part of him, every side to him. He longed to see the wolf and all it was capable of.

Klaus panted. He blinked. He stared down at Haruki’s body and tried to focus on what he had said and everything it meant. He felt something coursing through him from his feet up; something he didn’t even realise he had held back for years. Something that had reared its head only on a few occasions, and always with disastrous consequences. But now –

_Do anything you want._

He reached out to Haruki’s left hip and noticed his hand was trembling a little. He touched the warm flesh there.

‘Kid, I’m sorry…’ he said. He realised it was a warning.

And Haruki didn’t get a chance to reply.

* * *

Afterwards, the wolf slowly trickled out of him, draining out of his skin onto the sheets. He saw Haruki beneath him, his body shaking, taking shallow, shuddering breaths. His skin was marked everywhere, small angry red patches and even lines where fingers had been dragged against his flesh too hard and for too long. Sweat and dazed eyes. The end result of Klaus, his true self, unleashed and uncontrolled.

Unknown to either of them, it was a side of Klaus that only Taki had seen. In a basement room at the compound, where no sunlight could find them, Klaus had torn into Taki under the effects of drugs that were so strong that he awoke with no recollection of it.* Taki never spoke of it. He had filed it away with all those things, both large and small, that he had been unable to tell Klaus over the years.

Almost an hour had passed. The temperature dropped outside and the orange light of dusk was creeping over the compound. Klaus collapsed beside Haruki and found that words didn’t come to him. He knew he ought to say something. To make sure the kid was okay. But he quickly succumbed to an overwhelming exhaustion that, again, felt like it had waited out his entire life to find him. His apology died on his lips.

* * *

Haruki awoke with a start a few hours later. Night had fallen.

His heart gave a single loud throb when he turned to see that Klaus was still in his bed, bare-chested, his pants hooked low around his hips. It was the first time since the day he saw Klaus under the influence of morphine – a day that seemed like a lifetime ago – that Haruki had seen him sleep. He guiltily realised Klaus must have dropped off without meaning to. He sat up carefully, worried Klaus would leave if he awoke.

Haruki’s body ached suddenly – everywhere and all at once. He recalled how Klaus had been. How relentless and almost frightening. Haruki had lost count of the number of times he had come and how many times Klaus came inside him. He thought of the painful, tearing grip of Klaus’ hands on his hips and the way his body shuddered each time Klaus sucked or bit his skin. He had once pulled out completely just to take Haruki’s cock into his mouth and thrust three fingers, and even a fourth, into Haruki, angling them all just so he could press on his prostate and watch him come. He remembered Klaus kneeling over him not long after that, a hand gripping the back of Haruki’s head as he came, spurting over his mouth and lips before bending low to kiss him. He had then pushed Haruki flat on his back and started again.

None of the fantasies Haruki had concocted over the years had come close to the real thing. His neck was still painful and tender from the bite mark that had started it all.

A pair of wolves, he thought with the same small, disbelieving smile that crossed his face each time he remembered those words. He stared as Klaus’ chest rose and fell gently with each breath, wondering at how he could look so peaceful now.

Even more than the silent strength of his arms and chest, Haruki was taken by his face. The dim moonlight revealed the shape of his jaw, the strong chin, the sharp angle of his nose, the hair that reached closed eyelids. How much sorrow he had been through. How far away he still was.

For long minutes, Haruki just stared, wanting to touch him but afraid to wake him. And then, finally, he did. A gentle hand in the hair near his forehead. He felt the softness and coarseness of his hair and brushed the skin beneath.

He didn’t know that Klaus was in a land thousands of miles away. He was lying in a clearing that his mother had discovered years ago. His head was on Taki's stomach. And Taki's slender fingers were riffling through his hair. He turned to look at him. To let him know how much it meant that he was there. Though the warmth of the clearing began to disappear, slowly replaced by the blue light of Taki's room at the compound, he was relieved that Taki's fingers were still in his hair.

He opened his eyes to see Haruki draw his hand away, looking guilty.

‘I’m... sorry.’

In the dark, if not for his voice, it could even be him.

Pain and guilt and even a sliver of resentment towards Haruki surged at Klaus again like a living thing. He marvelled at how it could leave him winded even when he lay perfectly still.

‘It's alright,’ he said, his voice tight.

Haruki berated himself for having caved to the temptation to touch him. But as the seconds dragged on and Klaus lay there, he let himself feel a small flash of hope. Perhaps he would stay.

And yet again, he was surprised at how far he fell when Klaus got up.

As he left, Klaus wondered about the look he had seen in Haruki’s eye right as he woke up. And it brought about another, entirely different shade of guilt. Like waves crashing against each other. He thought of how Haruki had touched his hair. How long it had been since anyone had done that. He thought of all they had done a few hours ago. Things he'd never done before and made him feel things he'd never felt before. Lust, a wave all to itself. And so he rode all of them back to his shed where he slept and hoped he would wake up in the clearing ten years ago.

* * *

When Kolya di Lupo first laid eyes on Klaus all those months ago, a small, hard weight of certainty had formed in his gut. He had felt that kind of esoteric conviction before and all he knew was that he trusted it. As soon as Klaus had walked up to the commander and spoken to him, that certainty had grown.

He knew that Klaus was going to hurt Haruki in some huge, irreparable way.

And his distrust and dislike of the Saxon had only grown in the eight months since that day. He searched himself for jealousy and found some, only a little, somewhere in the background, fuelling his antipathy. He didn’t like the way Haruki looked at Klaus. It irked him to know what had, undoubtedly, gone on in Haruki’s bedroom over the past few weeks. But it was a kind of petty, exasperated jealousy that didn’t last in any real way – based entirely on his childish dislike of the fact that Haruki now had another shadow.

His sentiment that Haruki was in danger, however, wasn’t at all childish. It was real and it bothered him and he didn’t know what to do or say about it.

So he did and said nothing. He simply remained as close to Haruki as he could, just as he had sworn to do. His life belonged to Haruki. It had belonged to Haruki since the awful day in Eurote when Haruki had salvaged him from a kind of darkness he didn’t think he could ever be free of. He did and said nothing and waited until the day Haruki needed him.

Haruki, meanwhile, could tell that Kolya knew. He knew when to wait outside the door to the building, instead of outside Haruki's bedroom, and his expression seemed more pointed than usual when he saw Haruki in the mornings. He was relieved that Kolya never asked about it.

Though he was sure that Kolya knew, Haruki hoped he was imagining the waves of reproachfulness. It almost made him feel as though Kolya was judging him – silently reproving him for something that had been flitting around in Haruki’s mind a lot, ever since Klaus explained why he had kissed Haruki in the middle of a smoke-filled street.

He knew he was just helping Klaus find Taki. He was helping Klaus find Taki, just as he had done once in his youth, when he went with Klaus and Azusa and Date and Moriya to bring back their commander, and he had rolled over in bed once, in the room he had shared with Klaus, and watched Klaus sitting by the window in the middle of the night, his eyes and heart on his master.

He didn't know if he had, in any real sense, come any closer to Klaus since that day. In many ways, he knew that he was still a fourteen-year-old kid watching Klaus smoking by the window, barely aware that Haruki was in the same room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Reference to what I think might happen/is already happening in the Thorn Crown DJs.


	57. Ten Feet Tall

Honey-coloured sunlight lay thick over the compound late one morning. The air itself hadn’t warmed yet, but the strength of the sunlight that early in the day warned them of the intense heat that awaited at the end of spring.

In the small shed in the officer’s courtyard, that same thick sunlight fell in a small band across the bed. There, the commander’s wrists were tied to the railings of the bed with Klaus’ belt.

Haruki's skin chafed against the hard edges whenever he moved but he was more focused on the fact that Klaus was dragging his huge hands slowly over his torso and past his stiff cock.

He reflexively spread his legs wider and arched his back. Klaus’ tie was being used as a blindfold and it heightened every sensation. His shirt had been peeled back, baring him completely. Klaus, meanwhile, was fully dressed and ignoring the way his cock strained against his pants. He savoured the sight before him and let the anticipation and impatience course through him in little ripples.

The blindfold itself had been an organic development. After he had held Haruki face-down on the bed for some time and pushed into him with his fingers, he noticed that Haruki’s sounds and breathing were slightly different, slightly sharper, when he couldn’t see what Klaus was doing. And so Klaus slipped off his tie and followed his instincts. And, as it often happened where Haruki was concerned, doing so had paid off. Haruki’s body quivered in surprise wherever Klaus’ hands landed. His Adam’s apple jolted whenever he swallowed. His breath emerged hot and heavy. And it made Klaus feel heady with power.

He remembered how he had tied the sleeve of his shirt around Taki’s mouth only once, a long time ago, on the floor of his cottage, so his moans wouldn’t wake Claudia and the family. He remembered the guilty thrill he had felt then. One he had stifled almost as soon as it arrived because he knew it would herald much worse if he let it.

And now here it was, doled out slowly and deliberately and in new ways, in ways that seemed to reach new places in Klaus’ body each time he indulged.

For Haruki, it was as though Klaus was everywhere. He could only gasp when he first felt the tight grip of the leather belt securing him to the bed. He then clenched his eyes shut beneath the blindfold and waited, not knowing what to expect. He gasped each time Klaus touched him somewhere new. And he gasped again when the familiar, almost comforting warmth of Klaus’ palms turned into the concentrated heat of his mouth and tongue.

Klaus kept it up with just his fingers and tongue for so long that Haruki heard himself begging for more. He would be pushed to the brink only to be pulled back again.

‘Please… please... Klaus, I can’t –’

But for ten agonising minutes, Klaus refused to fuck him. And he never let Haruki come.

So when he finally acquiesced, worried that he himself wouldn’t be able to last, he was both surprised and not when Haruki arched his back again and came almost as soon as Klaus’ cock pushed in.

‘That soon?’ he said with a smirk that Haruki couldn’t see but could hear.

Haruki breathed hard, his mind a blank, still pulsing around the length of Klaus’ cock.

‘It just... felt so good,’ he breathed, trying to justify it. ‘You always… feel good…’

Something flickered in Klaus then. A feeling that was a little different from the voice telling him to start fucking again. He thought of Haruki earlier that day, springing from the tank onto the dusty, unpaved road in the fourth rural town they had successfully taken back. He saw that look in Haruki's eye as his bike drew alongside. That intentness and pity and compassion. He had talked headquarters into an encirclement manoeuvre rather than an out-and-out attack, which had saved countless lives.

And he was thinking about all the times Haruki had laughed back at the cottage. He was thinking of how Haruki had blushed and smiled nervously when Klaus told him about the girl in Braxton who had threatened to sleep with him. He was thinking of the way Haruki looked at him before each of their sorties.

And he reached up and undid the tie around Haruki’s eyes.

When the darkness of the blindfold fell away, replaced by the thick late-morning sunlight that was glowing a strange, unseasonal amber, Haruki blushed self-consciously beneath smouldering golden eyes. Klaus kissed him deeply, holding himself in place inside him.

Haruki breathed hard into the kiss and strained against the belt holding his wrists, wanting to hold Klaus again in the only way he was able to.

Klaus pulled back slightly and looked at him again. He took in the bound hands and the semen on Haruki's stomach and chest.

‘I almost don't want to untie you,’ he quipped, reaching over Haruki to run his fingers lightly along the belt. ‘I could keep you in here for days until Kolya breaks the door down.’

Though Haruki's heart rate picked up at the very thought, he felt the belt loosen and fall away. But before he could reach up, Klaus spun him around and held him to the bed once more. He flattened his hands over both of Haruki’s and began to pound.

 _‘Ah!_ Oh, shit… Klaus, _yes –!’_

Despite the words being pushed from his mouth, around half a minute in, Klaus could sense that Haruki was struggling to catch his breath. His moans sounded a little more strained than Klaus was used to.

And so Klaus grit his teeth and slowed down. He held himself in place around halfway in and bent forwards.

‘Hey,’ he said near Haruki’s ear. ‘Breathe, kid. Okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki panted back, a little dizzy and breathless from having come. ‘It’s okay, I’m fine. Don’t stop.’

That was all Klaus needed to hear.

‘Not planning to.’

And he thrust in his full length and Haruki moaned.

‘Not going to stop until I’ve filled you up.’

‘Ah… _yes!’_

‘I’m going to fill your whole body with my come, over and over again. And then I’m going to fuck into your come-filled hole. And then when you’re dripping and there’s no more room, I’m coming on your face and your ass and your stomach until you’re covered in it. You got that?’

‘Mmmh, yes. Do it!’

_Do anything you want._

Haruki’s words, both from that day and from a week ago, filled his head as he kept thrusting. His grip on the back of Haruki’s hands tightened.

* * *

Klaus’ hunger was no longer a thing simply to be sated. It was now something to be pursued. Something he followed just to see how far he could go. How far Haruki would go. And the results were thrilling.

He no longer bit down on Haruki too hard, or clawed at his flesh, or did anything else that he now recognised as symptoms of the creature he had suppressed for years coming up to meet him in uncontrolled, unexpected bursts. In just over a week, since the day Haruki told him not to hold back any longer, he had learned to control it. He learned to trace out the patterns of his desires, and Haruki’s, in new and devious ways that culminated in a raw, visceral passion that engulfed them for hours at a time.

Though Haruki welcomed all of it, often with a familiar disbelief at the extent to which Klaus wanted him, he most cherished the few minutes that came immediately after, when Klaus floated to him through the ebbing waves of his climax and the sweet, mild pain surged in his body in various places. He noticed that the more intense the sex, the longer Klaus would stay.

When they both came a final time, Klaus was holding Haruki up. The commander’s body was curved backwards, arm back, his head on Klaus’ bed. Seeing him ejaculate like that brought Klaus to his own climax. He shot deep inside him yet again and the constrictions of Haruki’s ass made his previous two loads come trickling out from around his cock. He panted there for a while, still inside Haruki, looking down over his body and seeing only his heaving chest and chin and lips. Suddenly wanting to see his misted-over brown eyes, he took Haruki's left forearm in his left hand and pulled him up. Dark hair fell back over his forehead as he was righted and his eyes focused, through a haze, onto Klaus. Klaus’ stomach flipped.

He lowered Haruki to the bed, pulling out as he did so. His come leaked out of Haruki onto the bedspread. Haruki glanced down and seemed embarrassed.

‘Oh... sorry.’

Klaus chuckled.

‘It's alright. It's my mess, anyway. Yours is still on you.’

He then bent over and licked some of it off Haruki’s stomach, running the tip of his tongue between the muscles of Haruki’s abdomen.

Haruki exhaled slowly and ran a hand through Klaus' hair, eyes closed. He realised his wrists were stinging pleasantly. Klaus made his way back up Haruki’s body and kissed him again before letting himself fall. Haruki held him then, grateful he was able to. He took in deep breaths of Klaus' warm, heavy, golden scent. And when Klaus tried to lift himself up, Haruki almost imperceptibly tightened his hold; imperceptibly enough that he could have passed it off as a move that wasn’t premeditated.

Klaus clenched his teeth again. He remained where he was, breathing against Haruki’s neck, for as long as he dared. Haruki held onto him, eyes open and heart beating, before Klaus moved away.

* * *

And remained where he was, lying on his stomach beside Haruki, before reaching for a cigarette.

Haruki, who had expected Klaus to get off the bed, watched him a little uncertainly. He shook his head when Klaus offered him one. They were in Klaus’ room, after all, he realised. Perhaps Klaus was trying to think of a polite way to tell him to leave.

A whole month had passed since Klaus kissed him in Hokane. In that time, it had always felt to Haruki like they would take two steps forward and one step back. He tried to remind himself how much it meant that Klaus had taken any steps forward at all.

He didn’t know that Klaus had had the same thought about Taki numerous times over the years.

Kaiser was lying on his side by the door; inside the room rather than outside. By then he had grown used to the goings-on between his master and Klaus and he often napped through it. Klaus watched his paws twitching in his sleep – little pulses, one paw at a time. He appeared to be seriously trotting somewhere in his dreams.

‘Want to hear something funny?’ Klaus said suddenly, his voice low and hoarse.

‘Uh… sure,’ Haruki said, beginning to sit up.

‘That day you came here asking to borrow my gun, back when you were a cadet, I was in here with Taki.’

Haruki paused and stared. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean Taki was in here and we were in the middle of something when you interrupted.’

A few seconds later, Klaus was gratified to see the slight blush that spread across Haruki’s cheeks.

More than slightly shocked, Haruki tried to readjust his memory of that day – the words he had said, the words that Klaus had said through the closed door – and tried to reconcile it all with this new information. It felt like something clicking into place and something shattering at the same time.

‘I had no idea! I’m sorry, I…’

Klaus’ low chuckle made him feel a little better.

‘Ten years late, there. Nothing to apologise for, kid. I only felt like telling you because…’ He paused, unsure what exactly had compelled him. ‘I guess because it’s fucking insane how things work out sometimes.’

‘You didn’t say anything. That day, I mean. If I’d known I wouldn’t have –’

Another smile. ‘I couldn’t exactly tell you to fuck off because I was doing the commander, could I?’

Whether or not it was jealousy that Haruki felt then – the first real surge of it he had felt towards Taki – it didn’t last long enough for him to be sure. Besides that, he was still trying to remember details from that day ten years ago, wondering how he could have missed it.

‘And I didn’t hear… anything…’

Klaus’ smile vanished. He suddenly remembered the blood on Taki’s arm from where he had bitten down on himself to keep from crying out. And then everything else about that awful afternoon came back to him in one fell swoop.

He looked at Haruki again and imagined the look on his face if he knew what had really happened that day.

_That boy looks up to you so much. And you betray him with this… depravity._

He took another drag before turning away.

With a sinking feeling, Haruki knew he had misstepped, though he couldn't think how.

‘You're welcome to use the shower,’ Klaus said. ‘Before you go back.’

Haruki felt the pang in a familiar place.

'Okay.'

He took his clothes into the bathroom.

He stepped out later to see that Kaiser had jumped onto the bed where Klaus was absently petting him.

'I forgot to mention,’ Klaus said, glancing up. ‘You did really well out there today. That little town doesn’t know how lucky it is that you were in charge.'

Haruki held his gaze and nodded once.

'I'll see you at training,' Klaus said.

He still looked strangely preoccupied but he threw Haruki a small wink that was met with a faint smile.

Haruki called to Kaiser and pulled the door of the shed closed after he stepped out. Like he had done once before, he stood on the landing for only a second longer than necessary before stepping off.

* * *

He thought about it on the walk to his office. He thought about what Klaus had said on Feulner's balcony about spending his whole life waiting for something, only to be grateful to have gotten that close. Haruki wondered what that meant about Klaus and Taki themselves. He had always assumed their lives together, once the war was over, had been blissful. Maybe it was more complicated than that. Reality, Haruki slowly came to understand, was always more complicated than that.

And then he thought about what had taken place in the shed that fateful day ten years ago and what he had felt minutes ago when Klaus revealed that little secret; whether that feeling had, in fact, been jealousy. It was the first time Klaus had acknowledged that side of his relationship with Taki.

Perhaps it was envy; something lighter and less concentrated. Less underhanded.

And then he wondered if it perhaps hadn’t even registered as envy because that slow, undulating, guilty feeling that was always there, always in the background, ever since Hokane and even for years before that, had always been envy. And it had never progressed to jealousy because it had always been so far beyond his reach that jealousy made no sense.

It didn't make sense to be jealous of a prince and his knight.

* * *

The day would start with Taki. It would be spent with Haruki. And it would end with Taki again.

Klaus noticed the honey-coloured sunlight not long after Haruki left. He even sat there for long enough to watch it widen on the bedspread and slide off slowly. Towards the end of the day, he was idly surprised to see that same shade again, as if it too, like Klaus, found the quietest times of the day in which to make an appearance.

He couldn't do much about the middle of the day, when something pulled him to Haruki, some kind of internal force, fuelled on the other side by something as simple as reciprocity. It had supplanted his need for alcohol or morphine; his residual guilt would be channelled into what he did to Haruki and it would grow each time Haruki seemed to welcome it and revel in it.

But he owed it to Taki to reserve those quieter times of the day, times when he was alone, times when he made sure that he was alone, for thoughts of his true master. Thoughts, reminisces, questions, and even questions of forgiveness. Ever since his first unspoken apology beneath the wisteria tree at the Reizen residence, Klaus had started speaking to Taki again.  
  
He stepped back into the shed after a gruelling day out on the training grounds. And some faint scent in the air, mingling both the heavy spring air outside and the comforting musk within, brought the cottage to life again. It brought back a time when he could have stepped into the kitchen where Taki was making them tea.  
  
Now, Taki would be lying beside him on the narrow bed in the rich, honey-coloured sunlight, his body taking on that shade like it was a blank canvas.

‘That day when you said I was everything,’ Klaus said quietly. ‘What did you mean exactly?’

Silence.

‘I should have asked you, huh?’

_I was afraid you’d turn away if I tried asking._

Even after years, Klaus couldn’t stand it when Taki turned from him.

‘I miss you,’ he then said, his voice flat and true. ‘Every day.’

_Please forgive me. For all of this._

Silence.

* * *

Iszumi Shunsuke, the former and newly appointed media liaison to the Fifteenth Armoured Division, sat near Haruki in a meeting where Aizawa, in his officious yet now strangely upbeat tone, delivered all the details about the division’s successes in recent months.

Aizawa had previously told Haruki to leave all the ‘details’ to him. Haruki learned quickly that this meant he was to overlook all of the blatant exaggerations and embellishments that Aizawa delivered – all of which had the effect of overstating their victories and downplaying the _Hitobito’s_ strength and influence. No mention at all was made of the tactical nuclear weapons they now wielded.

Izumi himself had all the appearance of a jaded reporter who had lost faith in his profession and his species. He took notes automatically on his pad.

For some reason, Haruki’s nerves were steadily fraying as he listened to Aizawa. Klaus thought he saw the commander’s increasing agitation. It reminded him of something Taki had said.

_He has a strong sense of justice. Almost too strong._

It came to a head when Haruki tersely excused himself from the table and told Kolya to remain where he was.

On impulse, Klaus followed.

He stood near Haruki in the empty hallway outside, watching him pace.

‘This is the reality of it, kid,’ Klaus said, even though the same indignation broiled in him. ‘Tachibana’s east.’

‘I know,’ Haruki said.

It was on impulse that Klaus had followed him. And it was on impulse that he grabbed Haruki’s arm mid-step and kissed him.

They left the faint drone of Aizawa’s voice behind and headed for the exit.

‘Kid,’ Klaus warned, even as his mind threatened to divert all rational thought elsewhere. ‘We have to go back in there soon. We don’t have time to go all the way to –’

But Haruki already had an idea. He and Ryoumei had broken into many a supply closet in their cadet days. And he was feeling just angry and reckless enough.

Klaus’ mind switched gears completely as soon as Haruki opened the door to a two-roomed supplies closet, dimly lit and separated by a single shelf of cleaning supplies. The door closed as they kissed and stumbled back against the furthest wall. Klaus’ head knocked lightly against the hanging bulb and the light swung about erratically, throwing them from light to darkness in wide arcs.

The closet dully absorbed Haruki’s moan when Klaus held him up against the wall and thrust in.

A few minutes later, just as they were on the point of coming and Haruki’s moans were steadily escalating, Klaus heard footsteps on the echoing linoleum outside. He clamped a hand over Haruki’s mouth but didn’t stop. Haruki’s breathed heavily into his palm and moaned and tensed as he came. Klaus followed soon after.

The footsteps receded.

Just as Klaus removed his hand and pulled out of Haruki, the closet door opened without any warning and bright voices filled the small space.

Haruki froze. Klaus instinctively pressed against him, flattening them both into the wall between shelves, trying to melt into the darkness. Haruki’s hand unconsciously clenched the shoulder of Klaus’ uniform.

‘That’s so stupid, why would you pick the actual dog?’

‘Duh, because he’s faster than the other two. And he can, like, kill you if he goes for your throat.’

‘But he’s just a _dog.’_

Cadets, Haruki realised. No older than thirteen or fourteen. It sounded like there were three of them and they were rifling through the shelves in the adjacent room. Only a wall-shelf of supplies protected him and Klaus from discovery.

Klaus very carefully lowered Haruki to the floor.

‘He’s cooler than most dogs. Did you see Lieutenant Honda with him? He can do tricks and stuff.’

‘Okay, but Kaiser can’t do real stuff.’

‘What do you mean real stuff?’

‘I mean like hold a gun, or beat you at kendo. Captain Klaus beats Haruki-sama at kendo all the time.’

‘No way!’

‘He does! Aoki said so!’ the cadet insisted.

And suddenly, despite where he was, a smile broke across Haruki’s face. Klaus’ eyebrows went up and he glanced over his shoulder, though he could barely see the boys through the shelf.

‘Well, my favourite’s Private Kolya,’ the third voice decisively announced.

‘That’s just ’cos you’re half-Eurotean,’ his friend pointed out.

‘Even if I wasn’t, he’s still the coolest one.’

‘But he’s only a private.’

‘So? He’s still one of Haruki-sama’s Mad Dogs.’

‘At least he’s a real person,’ one of them sniggered.

‘Shut up,’ the Kaiser-advocate retorted.

Haruki chuckled softly, still holding onto Klaus. Klaus held a finger to his lips in warning, despite his own wide grin. They had all but forgotten the meeting with Aizawa and Izumi.

As the cadets bickered behind them, sorting through the shelves for whatever they might pilfer, Klaus glanced down to see Haruki still struggling to contain his laughter. He saw the deep eyes reflecting the light of the single bulb that was still swaying gently.

And there, of all places, as he held Haruki against the corner in the dark, a strange new feeling rippled through Klaus.

He lowered his head and brushed his lips against Haruki’s. Haruki responded in kind. Neither closed their lips fully for fear of the sound it would make. It was an odd and tender action; one of careful affection rather than passion. Klaus then lifted his head slowly, eyes over his shoulder again, worried each time it sounded like the cadets would stray past the wall-shelf.

When the kids finally left, taking their unresolved debate with them, Haruki breathed a sigh of relief.

Klaus pulled away to make sure they were gone before he turned back to kiss Haruki fully, which came to Haruki as a happy surprise.

‘I should probably be offended that I’m tied neck-in-neck with the other two.’

They returned to the meeting feeling a touch more buoyant for a reason that neither could have articulated. It was as though, despite whatever Tachibana was doing to the country, they had accidentally discovered that there were small corners of the world he couldn’t touch.

* * *

The cadets' light-hearted little debate was playing in the back of his mind that afternoon when Klaus challenged Kolya to a friendly spar.

He wondered about the strange look on Haruki’s face when he did so.

And he wondered about the fierce look in Kolya’s eye as they faced off.

After having seen Haruki defeat Kolya on numerous occasions, Klaus was taken aback by how good he was. The Eurotean's strikes were precise and strong and he never seemed to break a sweat.

Klaus was irritated when he found he had to wipe his forehead and that he was breathing heavily minutes into the spar whereas Kolya simply stood his ground nearby, chest rising and falling just slightly.

And his suspicion went up several notches when Kolya suddenly came at him with a force Klaus didn’t expect. He was on the defensive and a fortuitously timed dodge narrowly saved the match for him. He then spun around just in time to see Kolya’s arm coming down hard.

‘Kolya!’

Perhaps it was that Kolya was distracted by Haruki’s call or perhaps it was a warning that he heeded. Either way, Kolya seemed to lose focus and missed Klaus by inches. Klaus spun around and struck him across the back, shinai resting finally in the back of his neck.

Still, Klaus panted and narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

Something told him that Kolya had let him win.

* * *

He pondered about it, on and off, for the next few days – right up until the morning when he opened the door of his shed to find the Eurotean standing on the front step alone.

Klaus stared in surprise for a moment before his hands went into his pockets. Kolya’s fists remained by his sides.

Klaus felt like he was staring at a wall of ice.

‘Can I help you?’ he said in Eurotean, just to irk him.

‘The commander is sick, sir,’ Kolya replied bluntly, in the Eastern language.

Besides the fact that it was an answer he didn’t at all expect, the word suddenly brought the worst year of Klaus’ life to mind.

‘Sick?’

‘He has a fever. But he still plans to go to the capital.’

Klaus recalled Haruki’s schedule for the day; one that didn’t require the services of his captain. He was to meet with delegates of Eurote in the capital to discuss each nation’s situation with the rebels and how they might be able to help one another. Between the members of Tachibana's administration and Rossi's delegates, the meeting was bound to be contrived and coercive and gruelling and Klaus remembered wishing he could have been there to help the commander out.

‘Let the kid do what he wants, I’m sure he can handle it.’

‘It is a bad fever,’ Kolya said simply. ‘He should be resting.’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘He will not listen to me.’

‘And you think he’ll listen to me?’

In the silence, it was clear that they both knew that Haruki most likely would. It also seemed as though Kolya was disgruntled by that fact, even though his expression barely shifted.

And so Klaus found himself following a half-step behind Kolya as they headed for the jeeps where Kolya had left the commander waiting.

Klaus took a moment to consider the Eurotean.

‘Who exactly are you, Private?’

His tone was light but his intentions were clear. It had all the markings of a question that had been nine months in the making.

There was a brief silence.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do.’

Another pause.

‘I think you threw the fight on purpose the other day. I’m trying to figure out why. Haruki hasn’t told me anything, but I can tell when someone’s hiding something. And I don’t trust anyone who has something to hide.’

He thought, poignantly, of Hans.

‘So what’s your end game? Why are you here?’

In the silence that followed, Kolya considered his words carefully. He heard the Saxon’s sure step behind him and even that managed to irritate him.

‘I’m here to protect the commander.’ Kolya then cast him a glance. ‘And to stop anyone from hurting him.’

It was a presentiment Kolya shared with Suguri, in a way. And, in another way, it was a presentiment he had shared with Haruki’s old servant, Ukiyo, who had warned Haruki almost ten years ago that it seemed to be the curse of saints to fall into the hands of devils.

The following pause seemed a great deal more strained than the ones before. It was as though Kolya had bared his teeth just a little. And Klaus felt his own hackles raise.

‘Was that a threat?’

‘No,’ Kolya said smoothly after turning back. ‘Sir,’ he added begrudgingly.

They walked the rest of the way in stony silence.

It only took one look at Haruki for Klaus to know that Kolya had been right to be concerned. The commander was leaning on the jeep with a bracing hand, which Klaus had never seen him do. His face was both flushed and pale, eyes watery and almost unfocused. He seemed surprised to see Klaus.

Klaus, who had always considered the young commander to be the picture of health, was taken aback. He had last seen Haruki the previous afternoon during a training session where he had seemed only a little tired.

‘Geez, kid. You’re barely standing up.’

‘What – no, I’m fine. I’m just –’

‘You,’ Klaus said suddenly, turning to speak to the sergeant who had been about to drive them to the capital. ‘Tell Colonel Hasebe he’s taking over for the commander in the capital today. Find a maid and tell her to go up to the commander’s bedroom with cold water and a compress. Then tell Suguri to come see the commander straight away. You got all that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No, wait –’

‘Let Hasebe field this one, kid. It’s what the second-in-command is for.’

‘But –’

‘Don’t make me throw you over my shoulder and drag you to bed.’

Haruki’s face coloured even more, but no one within earshot heard anything strange in what Klaus said. The twinkle in Klaus’ eye and his half-smile and the fact that the sergeant had already gone to deliver Klaus’ orders made him acquiesce and walk meekly back to his building.

Even though his head felt like it was full of some thick, churning liquid and he was longing to lie down, he hated the idea of Klaus thinking he was weak in any way. He threw Kolya a reproachful glance that Klaus noticed.

‘No point getting angry at him for coming to get me. He’s just doing his job. If you drop dead in the middle of the meeting at the capital, it would have made him look bad as your bodyguard.’

Kolya hadn’t been dismissed at the entrance to the building, so he followed them all the way to the commander’s bedroom where he stood outside by the double doors.

Inside, the maid had already arrived and was waiting by the bed with the compress. Klaus, his face serious, stepped close to press his hand to Haruki’s forehead. Haruki’s eyes closed at his touch. He felt foolish and guiltily pleased at the unexpected attention. Klaus then told him to undress.

Still blushing, glancing once at the maid who looked on sympathetically, Haruki began to unbutton his jacket.

* * *

Klaus knew that Taki’s illness had a part to play in his overreaction. And in his anxiety over the next three days when Haruki’s fever refused to break and he spent most of his time in a deep, fitful sleep, his face shining with sweat.

When Suguri came back to check on him on the third day, he frowned and mumbled that he ought to have gotten better by then.

He had seen, on the first day he had been summoned to the bedroom, the conspicuous marks on Haruki’s chest and shoulders. He had blinked for a moment before turning to glare incredulously at Klaus. Klaus who had been staring out the window, trying to quell memories of hospitals, didn’t catch the doctor’s damning look. Suguri had then turned back to the young commander, who even then seemed to be struggling to stay awake, and felt he had been transported back in time. Unsure if what he suspected was even true, he controlled his anger and disbelief and silently tended to Haruki before buttoning his shirt back up.

They had barely exchanged any words since Suguri’s outburst when Klaus first arrived at the compound. And it took all of Suguri’s self-restraint to avoid a similar confrontation. He knew that Klaus had nothing to do with Haruki’s fever, just as he knew, in his heart of hearts, that Klaus had nothing to do with Taki’s illness. But he wouldn’t let Klaus absolve himself of the guilt so easily. He deserved all that guilt and more.

When he left the room on that third day, he glanced over his shoulder to see Klaus sit by Haruki’s side in bed, shoulders slumped. He frowned and walked down the hall, lost in memories of wars that all seemed to blend together as one.

Suguri was gone by the time Klaus put a hand on Haruki’s calf through the blanket and watched him sleep. He thought of the way that Haruki had held onto him in the supplies closet as he came. The cadets and the overheard conversation and the silent laugh that lit up Haruki’s face. He thought of the way Haruki looked at him.

In a moment of angry confusion, he couldn’t remember if Taki had looked at him like that. Whether it was merely that Klaus was unable to remember, or if it was that Taki simply never had, or –

He clenched his eyes shut and tried to banish thoughts like that. He focused on Haruki.

‘Get better,’ he ordered quietly.

Kaiser gave a pointed huff where he lay by the foot of the bed.

Klaus thought he had done a decent job of keeping his anxiety in check. So when he opened the door to Haruki’s bedroom on the morning of the fourth day and to see the bed empty and Haruki coming out of the en suite looking as well as he ever did, Klaus didn’t expect the relief to hit him so hard.

‘I feel ridiculous for all the fuss I caused,’ Haruki said, abashed and grateful at the same time. ‘I’m fine now, honestly. And I’m about to be late for a conference with the Fourteenth. I was hoping you’d be able to come with –’

‘Cancelled that.’

‘What?’

‘We cleared your schedule for the next few days. Hasebe’s taken most of your duties on board. You didn’t look like you’d be back on your feet for a while.’

‘But I’m fine.’

Klaus gave him a once over. The wet hair and the untucked shirt. The familiar intentness in his eyes. Something slowly trickled into Klaus in place of relief.

‘You do look okay,’ he agreed.

Haruki seemed relieved. ‘I’ve neglected my duties for long enough. I’ll tell Hasebe to –’

But he stopped when Klaus, without pausing, went to the door and cracked it open.

‘You've been dismissed,’ he said to Kolya who looked at him in slight surprise. ‘Report to your post outside the building.’

A brief impasse through the partially opened doorway.

 _Or stay and hear everything,_ Klaus sent him silently.

When Kolya left, his jaw locked in place, Klaus shut the door and turned to Haruki, who felt a familiar spark race through his body at the look on Klaus’ face.

‘Undress,’ Klaus said, in a tone that couldn’t have been more different from an identical order he gave from the same place only days ago.

* * *

It was a position that Klaus seemed to favour; sitting up with Haruki straddling him and holding onto his neck. They finished like that again not long afterwards. Klaus was caught up in how Haruki smelled fresh out of the shower. The scent of soap and that pleasant humidity rising from his skin. Something about it, something about Haruki’s natural scent, brought to mind that sun-drenched bedroom he had forsaken. He was in the same room now but the light was weaker.

As he panted and waited for his mind to return to him, he wondered vaguely if he had imagined it, then. Was it possible for light to be so bright? To have filled every corner of a room so that, in Klaus’ mind, it came through in a kind of ethereal haze? Perhaps he had idealised that moment, in hindsight. That moment that he had turned his back on. The kind of light he didn’t deserve.

He realised a few seconds late that he had fallen back against the headboard with Haruki still on top of him, both gasping for air. And he noticed, and Haruki did too, that his hand was still on the back of Haruki’s head, holding him gently against Klaus’ shoulder.

When Klaus moved his hand, Haruki slid off Klaus’ hips onto the bed beside him, eyes still closed. He tried to pull his left leg away from Klaus’ lap. To his surprise, Klaus’ arm around his waist and his right hand on Haruki’s knee kept him where he was.

Trying desperately not to let his hopes soar, Haruki remained there, sitting sideways across Klaus’ lap, breathing in Klaus’ scent, his head resting on Klaus’ shoulder.

‘Took your time getting better,’ Klaus murmured.

‘Sorry,’ Haruki said, a little bemused.

‘It's not like you to get sick. Cutting back on sleep again?’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki admitted. ‘Recently I’ve been looking over city plans of Hokane. When headquarters ask us to take it back, I just want to make sure –’

‘Enough, kid,’ Klaus said brusquely. ‘It’s one thing to have a sleep-deprived nap in Watanabe’s garden. This was…’ He sighed in frustration, trying to assign words to his thoughts. ‘Your men lost you for a few days there. You can’t keep pushing yourself like this.’

Haruki was too surprised to even blush. None of what Klaus had just said had sounded like him. He braved a glance up. Klaus’ head was tilted back but he was watching Haruki out of the corner of his eye, his golden irises sharp from above his scar.

‘You’re right,’ he said quietly.

Klaus wondered if he’d been too hard on him. He knew his own scars and paranoias had factored into the past four days. And he wondered with a vague sort of guilt if he had any right to tell Haruki to take care of himself given what he did to the commander on a regular basis. He squeezed the hand that was on Haruki’s knee and slid it a few inches up his thigh and back.

Haruki watched it in a slight daze. The long fingers. The wide knuckles. The warm palm.

The last time someone had been with him like that, with that tender, purposeful touch, had been back in the west. And then he remembered something; a story from flight school that he hadn’t yet told Klaus.

‘I actually had a fever like this once before,’ he said. ‘I’d lost a lot of nights studying for my test flight. And in the end I got sick on the night before the exam.’

‘Did you have to cancel the flight?’

‘No.’

‘They let you fly sick?’

‘I didn’t tell my instructor I was sick,’ Haruki said, a little sheepishly. ‘I just really wanted to fly that day and pass. I only needed a pass and a few more hours under my belt to be made Captain, so I was impatient. Around ten minutes into the flight, I was so lightheaded that I fumbled the controls and we pitched to the left, hard.’ He held out his hand subconsciously, wrapped up in the memory, to imitate the movement. ‘We dropped for nearly five seconds.’

‘Fuck.’

Klaus could easily imagine that lurch in his gut as the plane pitched. It was as though he was there in the cockpit with Haruki.

‘So I’m guessing you failed your first run.’

‘No, I passed.’

‘What?’

‘You won’t believe me, but as it turned out, the instructor’s next order was for me to pitch hard to the left and correct the aircraft in under five seconds.’

Klaus absorbed his words with a disbelieving frown.

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No,’ Haruki said with a chuckle. ‘It was such a huge coincidence that he decided I must have studied up on his test flight instructions so well that I could foresee what he was about to tell me to do. Plus, I corrected our trajectory well enough that he didn’t think it could have been an accident.’

‘Goddamn, Wolfpup,’ Klaus laughed. ‘That’s some luck.’

‘I know, I still can’t believe it to this day. Ryoumei was fuming. He didn’t stop giving me a hard time about it for months.’

Leaning his head against Klaus’ shoulder, Haruki had retained his wide smile as he told the whole story and his gentle eyes were focused somewhere in the past. Klaus’ own grin flickered a little as he watched him and he succumbed to the urge to kiss Haruki while he smiled, as though he wanted to capture some of that brightness for himself.

Haruki was caught off guard but it didn't take him long to respond. His hands went to Klaus’ face, trying to find more when it felt like Klaus might draw away.

But he didn't. Klaus breathed him in and pulled him closer, still hearing the gentle echoes of their laughter from moments ago. He suddenly forgot about everything else. For just that one moment, in place of talons and ink-stains, there were fire-lit offices and moon-lit balconies and grass that was a fairer imitation of wheat rippling in the breeze near where a young commander slept.

A small fissure. The tiniest crack in his armour. And the light spilled through, filling every corner of him like it did that sun-drenched bedroom he had once turned away from.

And before he could pull back from that to catch his breath, Haruki had pressed his lips to his jaw and then kissed his neck beneath it and Klaus’ eyes shuddered closed, accompanied by a small frown. He tried to focus but each time he looked down at Haruki’s eyes he felt himself slip again, feeling something uncannily like a morphine high.

It didn’t help that Haruki’s hands were on Klaus’ chest, long fingers trailing over his taut muscles and down his abdomen. He had never felt his own strength quite like that before, through the touch of another. He felt Haruki’s fingers and the firmness of his own body in tandem. He heard that his own breathing was starting to become ragged. So caught up was he in the measured, reverent feel of Haruki’s lips on his torso that he was almost surprised when Haruki’s hands found his cock.

‘Shit,’ he breathed.

Haruki’s face was flushed from the way Klaus’ body was responding. Normally, by now Klaus would have grabbed his wrist and taken the lead but, for a change, it seemed Klaus was content to let Haruki’s hands wander. And so he lifted up and hunched low over Klaus' hips, pausing only to draw his lips over the defined muscles of his stomach. He then felt huge hands on the back of his head as he took Klaus’ cock, already half-hard, into his mouth.

Klaus’ mind was slowly turning to white again as Haruki skilfully took him down his throat, surfacing again to lick his tip and slide his lips down along the shaft, taking his balls into his mouth gently, before coming back up to envelop his cock fully again. Klaus realised it was a sensation he enjoyed even more than when he was fucking him.

He rammed himself up into Haruki’s throat without thinking, going deeper than he had gone before, and caught Haruki by surprise. Haruki choked and pulled off him.

Klaus’ guilt was immediate.

‘Sorry, kid. You don’t have to –’

‘No, it’s okay, I want to. It’s just… you’re so damn big…’

Klaus chuckled, his head spinning again, guilt and lust and affection all fighting for prominence.

‘Haruki…’

But Haruki had swallowed him again and before Klaus knew it, he was holding Haruki’s hair, clenched hard in his fist, as he thrust up. The tip of his cock was squeezed at the back of Haruki’s throat with every plunge. Haruki moaned, feeling Klaus’ body tense up beneath him.

Klaus groaned loudly through his teeth as he came. Haruki felt him come and the sensation of it, the knowledge that he had been responsible for it, was enough to make him come too. He came over his fingers and the sheets beneath them.

He remained on Klaus’ cock for a while before pulling off with a sound that made Klaus’ cock stir again, even though it had been all but seconds since he came. Again his climax had hit him hard enough to see lights blink across his vision. Whenever he and Haruki came together, it was always sex like Klaus had never known before.

He felt Haruki still hovering near his hips and stomach and he pulled him up into a kiss and tasted himself on Haruki’s tongue. He had pushed him backwards onto the bed, intending to give Haruki a bit of release too, when he noticed.

‘You already came?’

Haruki, hair splayed around him on the bedspread, seemed slightly embarrassed. He lifted up his hand. ‘Yeah.’

‘When?’

‘When – when you came.’

Klaus took his hand and licked Haruki’s come completely from his fingers. Haruki groaned at the sight.

Then, with a heavy exhale, Klaus lay beside him.

Haruki wondered if he dared shift closer. To do something as simple and unassuming as lift up and lay his head on Klaus’ chest. He tried to imagine the warmth of Klaus’ arms around him when they were lying like that. Given everything else they had done, it seemed strange that Haruki still didn’t know what that felt like.

The longer Klaus stayed where he was, with no indication that he would pull Haruki closer, the more Haruki lost his nerve. He glanced up and met Klaus’ gaze. And suddenly he found he couldn’t look away.

It hit Klaus then, as he held Haruki’s stare and felt himself get drawn in.

It was something that had crested in small, indeterminate waves for a while. The way Haruki looked at him. It was the same. And it was entirely different. The way Haruki looked at him was identical to, and completely the opposite of, how Taki had looked at him. Where Taki's eyes had always drawn him in and made him feel small, Haruki’s had always made him feel ten feet tall.

Swiftly on the heels of that thought came the spiky, black little talon-clutch of guilt. He fought it off, for the moment. He closed his eyes against it. For the moment.

Haruki watched him, wondering what had just gone through his mind in the past few seconds.

But when Klaus opened his eyes again, he seemed like himself.

‘So your schedule’s clear for the rest of the day,’ he said lightly but with a sly edge to his tone. ‘The whole compound thinks you’re dead to the world. I say we ought to capitalise on that. What do you say?’

He watched, again in satisfaction, as a faint blush accompanied Haruki’s faint smile.

‘I shouldn’t,’ Haruki said, though he sounded deeply reluctant about having to decline. ‘I should at least –’

‘Alright, we’ll let everyone know you’re alive after, say… the afternoon briefing. Deal?’

‘Okay,’ Haruki said finally, his heart hammering from a kind of happiness that was almost juvenile. Klaus’ suggestion still gave them hours. Over six hours.

‘I should let you know, though,’ said Klaus nonchalantly as he stretched and splayed an arm across his forehead. ‘The maids are going to go on strike.’

Haruki was confused. ‘The maids? What for?’

‘For having to wash our sheets every day.’

Haruki blinked before letting out a short, incredulous laugh.

‘I'm serious,’ Klaus pressed, smiling broadly himself. He moved his head a touch closer to Haruki’s. ‘They probably draw straws in the morning to figure out who has to clean your bed and mine.’

Haruki was laughing again until he realised he couldn’t stop. His shoulders shook. It occurred to him just how bizarrely his life had turned out. And suddenly Klaus was chuckling too.

When he turned and peeked from beneath his arm, he saw that the sunlight was strengthening beyond the window, casting an effulgent little halo around Haruki’s hair. It occurred to Klaus that he hadn’t imagined it, then. That sunlight from weeks ago. Perhaps, if he waited long enough, it would fill the room again.

Even if it was just for those few minutes, even if he couldn’t bring himself to hold Haruki like he had held Taki, even if the darkness would seep back into him when he left the room, Klaus let that laughter take him in and cocoon him, just while he was there.

Somewhere near the door, Kaiser rolled onto his back, all four paws in the air, and continued to sleep soundly.

* * *

The order to take back Hokane arrived the very next day – the last day of spring. They had received word that Shoda was in Hokane and was using the port city as his base.

They were to bring him dead or alive and they were to take back Hokane in the name of His Majesty, Emperor Tachibana.

Haruki tried to clear his mind as he gave the order for the entire division to move out. He tried to remind himself of the fact that Nakamori himself said that the nuclear weapons they would be carting were only to be used in rural areas, and even then only as a reserve measure. None of the divisions so far had fired a single one of the new missiles.

All that would happen was a staged show of strength with new weapons and increased manpower and Shoda’s hand would be forced.

And Haruki would do what he had always done. He would do what headquarters asked of him while also ensuring as few casualties as possible.

His rallying speech through the speakers amounted to the same thing. They trundled up the roads to Hokane – tanks and jeeps and infantry and a single bike – and tried not to remember their crushing defeat there a month ago.

Grey clouds hovered over the small city, rumbling in the distance like a threat. Their sun-filled sojourn in Haruki’s bedroom the day before already seemed like a memory. Through the periscope of Onokami, the Ferdinand that had survived since Taki’s command, Haruki watched Klaus’ bike zip ahead and prayed that Klaus would follow orders that day.

His pulse was racing again, like it did before their first battle in Hokane, in a way that it hadn’t done before any of their other sorties.

 _They’re just nerves,_ he told himself. He glanced down at Kolya, whose unwavering gaze gave him comfort again. _Shoda will surrender if he has an ounce of sense. It won’t be like last time._

The increased manpower and even conventional weapons already proved to be a boon in the first few minutes of breaching the outer limits of the city. Though the insurgents managed to scramble a defense together in time, the Fifteenth was far more prepared for their advanced weaponry and tactics and managed to mow them down on streets and rooftops alike.

Haruki flinched each time a building was reduced to a crumbling mess. Each time the Earth shook.

_That’s the game we’re in._

He ordered his division to plunge ahead without stopping until they reached the inner city where the rebel leaders were.

Klaus carried the image of that focus in his commander’s gaze. It was like the world fell away for Haruki at the outset of sorties and all that remained was his need to get the job done and bring all of his men home. He didn’t even know if Haruki, from the skirt of Onokami, had seen him wink before he put on his goggles.

In Hokane, he swerved between jeeps and disobeyed Haruki’s order not to charge ahead, but only in small bursts. His disobedience paid off – two anti-tank missile carriers, one on the rooftops, one on the streets, were taken down.

‘Clear through to the eastern quarter,’ Klaus said over the speakers. ‘You reading me, kid?’

‘Yes,’ Haruki called back.

‘And I’m sure this time, at least on the ground. There might be more anti-tankers on the rooftops so keep your cannon trained. An anti-tank missile with the weapons we’re carrying might mean the end of Hokane as we know it.’

‘Roger that,’ Haruki said, his voice grave. ‘Klaus, the fifth infantry is having trouble in the eastern quarter. Be careful.’

‘Got it.’

It didn’t take long for Klaus to understand why. He cleared the next neighbourhood and came to a skidding halt, roaring behind a building just in time. The rebels had gathered a large mass of their forces; rows of anti-tank missiles, hundreds of _Hitobito_ members, armed to the teeth, standing in wait before the mayoral building.

‘Shit.’ Klaus clicked his radio back on. ‘Kid, change of plans. Do not approach eastern quarter. Mayoral building heavily blockaded. They’ll blow Onokami to dust. The fifth infantry is getting hammered.’

‘Should we send back-up?’

Klaus’ attention was temporarily taken up as soldiers from the division were pushed into his line of sight, being forced back by rebels. He raised his gun and fired. Though he didn’t make any hits, it gave his men a fighting chance to get away.

‘I don’t know, Commander. I feel like even back-up isn’t going to work. It’s like the entire fucking revolution is crowding around the goddamn mayoral building. I don’t know if we can make it in.’

Haruki grit his teeth. After a beat, he told Azusa to send Klaus’ report back to the compound to await further instructions from headquarters. It wasn’t dire enough for him to order a retreat but he didn’t want to risk losing his men in a standoff. He waited, hoping headquarters would see reason.

‘Sir,’ Azusa said a few minutes later, his voice tense. ‘Aizawa got word from headquarters.’

Just from hearing his tone, Haruki’s heart dropped to the bottom of the tank.

‘They want us to take out the entire eastern quarter of Hokane. Mayoral building and port. The objective is to take out the _Hitobito_ leadership and salvage what’s left of the city.’

‘That’s insane,’ Haruki uttered almost unconsciously.

Azusa’s expression was strained.

‘The orders are for a low-yield single nuclear missile from a location in the centre of Hokane. The impact should take out the mayoral building, surrounding neighbourhoods and port.’

‘Do we have a team on standby for that in the middle of the city?’ Haruki asked, hoping against hope the answer would be negative.

‘Affirmative,’ Azusa said tersely. ‘They’re waiting for your call.’

Haruki let out a single breath. His mind was buzzing.

It was a clear order from headquarters. The kind that came with a summary execution attached if he disobeyed.

One that would spell the end of Hokane.

One that would mark the beginning of a kind of warfare the world had never seen before.

It all rested, suddenly, at Haruki’s fingertips.

He took off his headphones and tried to breathe. The space in Onokami suddenly seemed inhumanly small. How had he ever breathed freely in that tank?

‘Sir.’

The sound came from the tank itself, not from his headphones. It was Kolya looking up at him from lower in the tank. Again Haruki drew strength from his gaze. He pulled himself together.

And put his headphones back on.

‘Klaus,’ he said clearly. ‘Do you read me?’

In the ominous silence from Onokami, Klaus had gotten off his bike and crouched near the corner of the building, trying to help the infantry units fight the front line of rebels. He heard the radio crackle from his bike in the distance and headed back.

‘Reading you, kid.’

‘Headquarters wants us to take out the mayoral building with a low-yield missile. Eastern quarter, port and all.’

Klaus’ brow furrowed in shock. Even amidst the cacophony raging only metres away, Klaus heard a ringing silence.

‘Klaus?’

‘Yeah, I’m here.’

‘I…’

Klaus suddenly remembered the look on Haruki’s face as he sat on the edge of the bed.

_Even if it means they’ll give me a blindfold and a post, I don’t care. I don’t think I can –_

He remembered his own words of advice. If Haruki refused, they would merely appoint someone else, on a different day, to do the capital’s bidding. At least, with Haruki at the helm, they could evacuate as many as they could. Klaus knew he would do that much.

Perhaps all they could ask for, in that new world, was for sin to be carried out by the saints.

‘Haruki,’ Klaus said.

Each syllable seemed to hang onto the specific beats of that very specific silence. Haruki had never clung to the mention of his own name with such urgency before.

Klaus took a few seconds before he spoke again.

‘It’s your call,’ he said.

* * *

When Azusa spoke to Haruki about it later, he confirmed that Haruki had taken no more than ten seconds or so to give the order.

But to Haruki, it felt like a life-age. He heard the warm notes of Klaus’ voice still in his ears. It was his call. That was the game he was in. The life he had chosen.

And he would deal with the consequences afterwards.

‘Open all channels,’ he told to Aizawa. The entire tank heard the sudden strength in his tone. ‘Order a retreat across the board.’

Azusa’s heart lifted. He complied at once.

‘All units to move away from eastern quarter. Mayoral building too heavily guarded. Back to base, now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Klaus, do you read me? Klaus?’

There was no response, but for the next few minutes, Haruki's attention was focused on turning Onokami back around and ensuring that all units were safely retreating.

Whenever he had the chance, he switched frequencies.

‘Klaus, come in.’

‘Sir,’ Azusa interrupted, ‘we’re getting reports from the fifth infantry. ‘The rebels are firing mortar bombs that destroyed several buildings surrounding the mayoral building.’

Haruki’s pulse picked up again.

‘All other teams reporting successful retreats, sir. Only the fifth is under fire.’

‘Send the sixth for back-up.’

‘Yes, sir.’

By then, they had reached the outer edges of the city. Haruki then made a split-second decision. He hailed one of the jeeps that was en route back to the division.

‘Sir?’ Azusa said as Haruki opened the hatch of Onokami.

‘I’m going back. I’m handing command of Onokami to you. Make sure everyone gets home safe.’

‘Roger that,’ Azusa said uncertainly as he watched Haruki and Kolya clamber out of the tank.

* * *

The jeep was driven by a second-lieutenant and a sergeant armed with a rifle and grenades. They made their way through the streets towards the din in the eastern quarter.

Haruki figured that Klaus’ unresponsiveness owed to two possible things. One of them was that he had lost his comms in a blast that was strong enough to take out the bike and radio, meaning their chances of finding him were higher near the buildings that had been destroyed by mortar bombs.

The other possibility was one that Haruki didn’t really entertain.

By then, the sixth infantry had helped bail out their comrades and the rebels, having heard that the army was retreating, had also begun to flock back to the eastern quarter. So the fighting had died down around the destroyed buildings.

And at the base of the second one they scouted, among the red bricks and dust, Klaus was on the ground a few feet away from his fallen bike in a strange crouch, his gun clenched in his hand and held to his head.

Haruki’s heart soared. He leapt from the jeep even before it had stopped moving.

‘Klaus! Klaus, are you okay?’

Klaus remembered how a month ago in Hokane, possibly only a few streets away, when he thought he'd lost Haruki in Murakumo, how it sounded like Haruki’s voice had come to him after he had suffered a shell blast near his head.

Now, after having suffered exactly that, he heard Haruki’s voice again in the same way. The bomb had gone off on the sidewalk directly across the street from him. Though it didn’t have any physical effect on his body in the same way that it destroyed the base of the building, it was, strangely enough, as though someone had set off a small, lethal little bomb inside his own head.

He remembered being knocked from his bike and hitting the pavement at a speed that had badly scraped his right forearm and leg through his clothes. But he barely remembered anything else. Time came to him in bursts and then stretched thinly, much like his hearing which alternated between painful pulsing thuds and distant drones. His vision was overwhelmed by a streak of blinding light. He couldn’t stay upright for long enough and found that the ground would come up to greet him no matter which way he tried to walk.

He tried to focus on Haruki as someone heaved him up to his feet with a strength he didn’t quite believe. Stern eyes and lips confirmed that it was Kolya. Klaus was half-carried, half-dragged back to the jeep with Haruki, gun drawn, hurrying alongside.

Again, Kolya didn’t seem to break a sweat.

In the backseat of the jeep, Haruki pulled Klaus’ eyelids open and tried to assess his state. He understood what must have happened and the kind of pain Klaus must be in. He took comfort in the fact that Klaus was breathing steadily.

‘Fucking hate Hokane,’ said Klaus blearily, as his vision and hearing went in and out of focus. ‘This city's taken two of my bikes now. Motherfuckers…’

Haruki arched his eyebrows in guilt and relief.

‘Try not to talk.’

‘If I ever see Shoda, I’ll make him give me back my coat and boots.’

‘Sshh…’ Haruki urged even as he smiled.

* * *

The day would start with Taki. It would be spent with Haruki. And it would end with Taki again.

The day was winding down. At least, it seemed that way to Klaus as he lay in a strange limbo in his own mind. And so his mind went to Taki again, dutifully.

_Does he make you happy?_

And suddenly there was Claudia’s voice, an echo of it, from a simpler time.* They were lying side-by-side on the bed that had once been their grandparents’. A simpler time, and a simple question.

But one that had nevertheless caught Klaus off guard. One that Klaus was suddenly struggling to answer.

_He – yes. Of course he does._

He had decided that day that if it wasn’t, if what Taki had brought him wasn’t happiness exactly, it didn’t matter. It was destiny. It was fate. It was something far more exquisite and urgent and all-consuming than mere happiness. It was –

Claudia had tried to ignore the fact that Klaus’ answer had come out sounding strange.

_Well, that’s all that matters, little brother. Prophecies and oaths and duty and loyalty are all grand and wonderful. But in the end, beneath all of that, the only thing that matters is whether he makes you happy._

_And how he makes you feel about yourself._

Ten feet tall…

The memory of Claudia’s voice brought him to consciousness where, to his dismay, he only felt the pounding weights of something between his ears. He remembered the way his skull had rattled and how the ground felt like it had cracked in two. It reverberated now like a thing trying to beat its way out of his head, pausing at the weak areas of the base of his skull and especially at his temples.

More came to him in waves; the smells and sounds of the infirmary around him. He was lying on his stomach, his face turned to the left. He could sense there were those nearby with far worse injuries than his. 

And still more of that conversation with Claudia came back to him. He recalled that she had then said, about Wilhelm, _I never once doubted I was loved._

Loved.

Tears threatened to spring to his eyes, even as they stayed closed, for a reason that he couldn't pin down for long enough to identify. And then he felt a hand pressing gently on his temple, precisely where the hurt was. He felt the fingertips following the pain as though it was visible, around his ear to the base of his skull and then back up to his temples, smoothing it away so the sharpness of the pain receded.

He knew it was Haruki before he opened his eyes. But he opened them anyway, just so he could see him.

‘How are you feeling?’

Klaus reached up and held Haruki’s hand down on his face. Haruki's heart skipped a beat.

‘Better,’ said Klaus before closing his eyes again.

* * *

It only took a few hours for Klaus to feel more or less like himself again. He sat up comfortably, appreciating the existence of dull colours when he rememebred the glaring, milky light that had flooded his vision during those ten painful minutes.

‘Primary shell blast injury with internal head trauma and ears affected by overpressure,’ was Suguri’s clipped diagnosis.

‘Fancy words meaning I got too close to a giant boom and it shook up my head,’ Klaus said, his voice husky.

‘Symptoms may surface sporadically,’ Suguri said, looking at Klaus coldly. ‘So don’t think you’re in the clear.’

‘For how long?’ Haruki asked in concern.

‘It depends, sometimes symptoms come and go for days. Sometimes weeks.’

‘Weeks?’ Haruki repeated.

‘Eh, I’m fine,’ said Klaus carelessly, cracking his jaw. ‘If it’s not a broken bone, it’s not an injury.’

‘Klaus –’

‘Sir,’ Suguri interrupted. It was a scene he had grown tired of in the last war. ‘With your permission, I have other patients who need my –’

‘Yes, of course,’ Haruki said.

Haruki cast a quick glance around the infirmary. More injuries than there should have been. And seventeen deaths, all from the fifth infantry, all seventeen of whom had died because Haruki had given them the retreat order instead of taking out the _Hitobito_ with their arsenal of nukes.

And, on top of all that, there would be retribution for that highly treasonous decision.

He sat on the edge of Klaus’ bed. Klaus looked at him and understood what he was thinking.

‘You made the right call,’ he said.

Haruki gave him a fleeting look. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘If I had done what headquarters wanted, you wouldn’t have been in harm’s way. You and –’

‘You would have sacrificed a city of people just to spare me from a mild headache?’

Haruki’s sigh was unfamiliar. It was one of restlessness. It almost reminded Klaus of Taki.

‘I know what you’re trying to say,’ Klaus said, a little more soberly. ‘But think of all the people, rebels and civilians, in the eastern quarter who owe you their lives. Granted, not a single one of them is as good-looking as I am, but –’

A reluctant smile.

‘– you made the right call, kid,’ he repeated. He hesitated for only a moment before saying, ‘Taki would’ve been proud.’

Their eyes met.

‘Heck, I’m proud,’ Klaus said warmly. ‘Every man in this division ought to be.’

An emotion swept over Haruki then, in shades he couldn't identify.

Klaus glanced at Kolya, who stood at the entrance to the infirmary. ‘And when headquarters comes for you, we’ll be ready.’

‘I’m not letting you or anyone else be pulled down with me,’ Haruki said firmly. ‘When they come, I’m ordering you to stand down.’

‘You can do whatever the hell you like,’ Klaus returned. ‘But I’m not known for following orders.’

As Haruki stared at him with a mixture of exasperation and gratitude and something else that made Klaus’ pulse pick up, he realised he had to stop himself from reaching out to touch Haruki’s face in broad daylight. He wondered if he was still suffering from the effects of the shell blast.

* * *

They came for Haruki the following day.

As they were let in through the front entrance by grace of General Nakamori’s rank, they prohibited the guards from alerting their commander and one guard had to be threatened at gunpoint to drop his radio.

They swiftly made their way through the compound to the main building. Black-clad members of Tachibana’s new branch of Imperial Guard, with Nakamori leading the charge.

Officers and soldiers who watched them walking up the steps felt an ominous fear for their commander.

The doors to Haruki’s office were thrown open.

Behind his desk, Haruki stood up.

Kolya drew up alongside Haruki. Klaus glanced round from where he was sitting.

Izumi Shunsuke, the division’s media liaison, also stood up nervously. With a reassuring nod from Haruki, he glanced at Nakamori and the six black-clad guards and quickly edged out of the office.

Nakamori expected to see the Eurotean who was never far from Yamamoto. He also expected to see Wolfstadt. He didn’t recognise, or care about, the thin man in his forties who promptly left.

‘Commander Haruki Yamamoto,’ Nakamori pronounced with no small degree of relish. ‘In accordance with the law passed down by His Majesty, the emperor, you have been found guilty of the high crime of treason. You will be passed into the hands of His Majesty’s Imperial Guard in order for your sentence to be carried –’

‘Sorry to interrupt you there, General.’

Klaus swiftly got to his feet and drew his gun at the same moment that Kolya moved in front of the desk, gun also drawn and eyes steely.

‘In order for the sentence to be carried out, you’ll have to go through all three of his Mad Dogs first.’

Nakamori was momentarily confused by Wolfstadt’s count. Then he heard a low, menacing growl from somewhere behind the desk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Because it's been so long since I wrote all the old chapters, for anyone who wanted to re-read Klaus and Claudia's conversation about happiness, just thought I'd mention that it's right at the bottom of [Chapter 23: The People’s Victory](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5884132/chapters/17248459).
> 
> Also I wanted to apologise - I know that a thousand and one things happened in this chapter. Keeping chapters short is my biggest hurdle these days. Hope you guys enjoyed it anyway!
> 
> Somewhere behind it all, I hoped to get across all those notions of compatibility and happiness I talked about in previous author's notes. This is around the time I wanted to welcome anyone with a different view about love and life and pairings and anything, really. Would love to hear from you! Xx


	58. The Hands of Devils

A long silence fell in the commander's office, and it made Kaiser's growl seem to take on a life of its own.

Summary execution without court martial. The new penalty for high treason had been on Klaus’ mind since Haruki defied headquarters in Hokane. Whether it would be as macabre as a blindfold and a post, as Haruki himself had alluded to, or a simple firing squad, or some other means that Tachibana had newly concocted, Haruki would be made an example of, with or without the buffer of a sham trial. So it was over Klaus' dead body that he would let Haruki be taken into the black hands of those guards. And whoever Kolya di Lupo was and whatever his reasons for being there, Klaus knew he felt the same.

Haruki’s heart hammered louder than Kaiser’s growl. He had pictured a scene much like this one ever since the order he made in Onokami, but it didn’t make reality any easier to bear. He could only imagine Klaus and Kolya being shot and falling to the floor of his office. He wanted to tell them to stand down, despite Klaus' numerous warnings that an order like that would mean absolutely nothing. Instead, he kept a hand on Kaiser’s collar, feeling the dog strain against his grip, and tried in quiet desperation to come up with a way of holding the other two back as well.

Meanwhile, General Nakamori's blood pressure was picking up. He had expected to deal with a few outcries and perhaps an angry officer or two but never actual resistance. On top of that, it didn't make sense to him why Wolfstadt and the Eurotean thought that the two of them could go up against the six members of Tachibana's secret police. Still, the look in both foreigners' eyes was enough for him to swallow and step back uncertainly, a hand on the holster of his own gun, though he believed that drawing it was beneath his rank and his standing. He realised not long afterwards that he ought to have tossed pride to the winds and drawn it.  
  
In that time, several things happened at once.

There was a thundering of footsteps in the hallway behind them. This spurred all six guards to move instinctively. The three closest to the door turned to face the newcomers. It sounded as though Hasebe and some of the other officers and soldiers of the division had gathered and were confronting the black-clad guards near the door. Klaus had never been happier to hear Hasebe’s voice. Shouts and orders echoed from the hallway. 

At the same time, the three guards left inside the room turned and advanced towards Haruki. Between both sets of black-clad guards, Nakamori stood, looking angry and uncertain.

Before Haruki could call out an order or make a decision, Klaus and Kolya immediately took advantage of the fact that the odds had been evened.

‘Haruki, stay back,’ Klaus called, at the same moment that Kolya moved forwards suddenly, catching one of the guards by surprise and seizing his wrist in a very specific, very merciless grip. The guard yelled and dropped his gun.

Of the three bullets that were fired in the office that day, the first came from the guard who turned to Kolya and fired. Kolya staggered slightly.

‘Kolya!’

In Haruki's shock, he inadvertently loosened his grip on Kaiser's collar. The dog flew straight for the black-clad guard who was closest to his master. The guard didn’t aim in time at the black-and-tan mass with bared fangs and Kaiser leaped up and clamped his jaw onto the guard's arm. They fell to the floor in a heap before a shot was heard; the second of three. After a whimper, Kaiser suddenly went limp.

And the third shot was Klaus swiftly putting a bullet in the leg of the only guard who was mobile. The guard fell to the floor and Klaus kicked his gun out of reach before turning to look at Kolya.

Kolya, who had paused for a moment after he had been shot and kept moving. It wasn’t until he had raised his gun and fixed it firmly before Nakamori’s startled face that blood seeped through the sleeve of his right arm, just below the shoulder. Klaus wondered how it was possible he was still standing.

But he didn’t have time to ponder it for long; the other guard had pushed Kaiser off him and was looking to spring back onto his feet despite the arm that Kaiser had mauled. Klaus trained the gun on him immediately.

‘Don’t move,’ he warned.

The other two, one with a sprained wrist and one that had been shot in the leg, seemed to be out of commission.

Haruki, meanwhile, moved towards Kolya.

‘Kolya –’

‘I’m fine, sir,’ Kolya said, his voice only a little strained. He even lifted his injured arm just slightly to warn Haruki to stay back. With his left hand, he still held the gun on Nakamori, who had turned pale.

‘This is… this is…’ Nakamori spluttered. ‘Outrageous. This –’

Haruki then glanced at Kaiser out of the corner of his eye, relieved to hear a few whimpers and a heaving chest.

‘Commander!’ Hasebe called from the door. To Haruki’s relief, he stepped through into the office unharmed. ‘Are you okay, sir?’

‘Private Lupo has been hit –'

‘I’m fine, sir,' Kolya tried again.

‘What happened outside?’ Haruki pressed.

‘We have apprehended the three other insurgents, sir, and –’

‘Insurgents?’ Nakamori blurted out, ignoring the gun in his face to turn to Hasebe. ‘Colonel, we are delegates of His Majesty, the emperor. You are to release my men at once and allow us to bring Yamamoto into custody –’

‘Custody my ass,’ Klaus suddenly said, his gun still pointed at the guard on the floor. ‘They’ll execute him as soon as he’s out of here.’

Hasebe glanced in slight shock at the commander and then at the general.

He had heard of the rumour that commanders were to be summarily executed if they failed to follow specific orders sent by headquarters. But neither Haruki nor any of the other commanders had been permitted to confirm whether or not such a law had been passed down. Hasebe held the gun by his side, suddenly at a loss.

‘The penalty for treason is summary execution,’ Nakamori pronounced suddenly, his voice regaining his old composure. ‘It has been decreed by Emperor Tachibana himself. And if you stand in the way, Colonel, you will be held accountable for the same –’

‘Colonel,’ Haruki said quickly. ‘Place General Nakamori and the guards from the Imperial Palace under arrest. For attempting to arrest a fellow officer of His Majesty’s army without just cause and for subversive action beyond the bounds of his rank.’

Nakamori emitted a huff that made his jowls quiver. His eyes were wide with disbelief.

‘Subversive…?’

The men that Hasebe had brought with him, five or six of them, filed through the doorway and milled behind their colonel, trying to understand the strange scene before them. The fact that General Nakamori was being held at gunpoint had thrown the entire chain of military command into disarray.

‘Colonel Hasebe,’ Nakamori said, his voice still strong. ‘You will release my men, arrest Wolfstadt and the Eurotean and hand over Commander Yamamoto to the military police. Those are orders from your general.’

Another long, ringing silence claimed the office. The soldiers of the Fifteenth waited. They realised, with their commander and their general at odds, the only commanding officer whose word they could follow safely were the colonel’s.

Hasebe stared. Decades of military training were working against him. Summary execution was a penalty so harsh he couldn’t fathom it. And yet an order from the general was akin to an order from the emperor himself. If he refused –

Klaus couldn’t believe how much suddenly rode on Hasebe’s shoulders. He grit his teeth and felt sweat break out over his forehead. A strange pulsing began at his temples.

‘Hasebe, use your brain for once in your fucking life –’

‘Klaus,’ Haruki said warningly.

After a glance at his commander, Klaus fell silent.

The seconds ticked by, punctuated by the grunts of the wounded guards on the floor. Haruki tried not to think about the fact that Kaiser had fallen completely silent. A strange and awful sorrow gripped him.

Hasebe, meanwhile, thought back on all four wars that he had fought. Orders he had carried out, to the word, every time, in every war. And then he thought of Taki Reizen. Their pillar of strength. A god in the form of a man who had led their nation to victory.

He looked for a long moment at Haruki and wondered what Taki would have done.

Then, finally, he lifted his chin and turned to Nakamori.

‘General Nakamori, you are hereby placed under arrest. You will be taken into the custody of the Fifteenth Armoured Division under the command of Haruki Yamamoto –’

‘This is treason, Hasebe,’ Nakamori said, his voice suddenly low and dangerous. ‘You will face the firing squad for this.’

‘Arrest them,’ Hasebe said decisively, turning to a major on his left. Two men moved to Nakamori and the rest went to the three guards who had been taken down on the floor of the office.

With a heavy sigh of relief, Klaus sheathed his gun. To his mild irritation, he found that the pulsing in his head had worsened slightly.

Kolya also lowered his gun. By then, the blood had seeped into a huge circle on his sleeve, richly red. His face still bore no sign of the fact that he had just been shot at close range. As the men from the capital were marched out of the office, Haruki finally reached him and Kolya looked down at him gently.

‘Take Private Lupo to the infirmary,’ Haruki ordered to one of the remaining men, eyes still on Kolya’s wound.

‘I can go myself,’ Kolya said quietly.

Their eyes met for a few moments. Though Klaus only gave them a furtive glance, it was enough for his jaw to clench involuntarily.

‘Then go,’ said Haruki.

‘Yes, sir.’

Haruki watched him leave then turned to Hasebe. ‘Have there been any more casualties?’

‘No, sir,’ Hasebe replied.

When the room was almost empty, with only Klaus and Hasebe remaining, Haruki finally moved to the fallen form of Kaiser. He knew before he shifted the dog’s weight onto his lap that Kaiser was no more. A wet, crimson wound in his ribs had soaked through his fur and now smeared Haruki’s uniform. The dog's mouth was hanging slightly open. His eyes were open too; hazel and empty.

Haruki gripped his fur subconsciously. That sorrow came to him again. For Kaiser and Kolya and Klaus and Ao and every man who had been hurt or lost under his command. He threatened to float above himself.

‘Haruki.’

Klaus’ voice brought him back.

Haruki glanced up at him and their look communicated the significance of what had happened. They had gone up against General Nakamori and won. He knew that what had taken place in that small office would have consequences, even more so than the decision he had made in Onokami in the middle of combat.

He turned to Hasebe. ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ he said, his voice laden with a quiet sincerity.

Hasebe looked at him and thought of the same thing; of what must have gone through the young commander’s mind in Hokane as he made an order that he knew would carry his own death sentence.

‘Sir,’ he said with a stiff nod.

‘See to it that the arrests are logged and forwarded to the capital,’ Haruki said, remaining where he was, crouched by Kaiser. ‘I’ll speak to the entire division soon.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Hasebe then hesitated as he watched Haruki stroking Kaiser’s fur beneath his ear. For a split second, it reminded him strongly of the day he had walked into Taki’s room to see their divine commander soiled with the blood of a foreigner who slept in his arms. He even spared a sideways glance at Klaus.

Haruki didn’t carry the same burdens. Purity wasn’t the heavy mantle that he needed to uphold in the same way that the former commander did. But Hasebe knew how much love and respect the new commander mustered. And seeing him like that made Hasebe feel a familiar restlessness.

‘Sir,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I can send someone to… That is, if you need someone to… remove –’

‘No, it’s alright,’ Haruki said quietly. ‘That’ll be all, Colonel.’

Hasebe only hesitated for another few seconds before saluting. He turned on his heel and left the office.

Klaus’ heart gave a painful twinge at the sight of Haruki crouching in the middle of his office holding Kaiser’s body. He also tried to ignore the way that the pounding in his head only seemed to get worse. The itch for morphine returned for the first time in a long time. A surprising little flash. He suppressed it.

‘You okay, kid?’ he managed to ask.

‘Yeah,’ Haruki said. Then, thinking he heard something strange in Klaus’ tone, he glanced up. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Not a scratch.’

But Haruki saw through it. He saw the furrow in Klaus’ brow and the sweat on his forehead. ‘You don’t look well.’

‘Just a headache. Must have been the gunshots.’

‘It’s from the shell blast,’ Haruki deduced, remembering Suguri saying the symptoms would come and go.

‘Ah, I’m sure it’s nothing.’

‘Please go and see Suguri.’

‘There’s no need.’

But Haruki’s look was resolute. Kaiser was gone and Kolya was hit and Haruki wouldn’t let Klaus’ injuries fall beneath the radar now.

Klaus sighed in exasperation. And although he eventually agreed, it was mostly due to his intuition that Haruki, for the time being, probably needed to be alone.

* * *

Both Klaus and Kolya were confined to the infirmary when Haruki called an emergency meeting of all personnel to the square. He stood beside Hasebe as he told his men, in the strong, measured tone to which they had all grown accustomed, that General Saigo Nakamori had been arrested for acting outside of the bounds of his duties as general and would soon be taken to the capital where he would await court martial.

‘I have been in touch with the Imperial Palace,’ Haruki said, trying not to remember the thinly disguised threats that had been delivered by Tachibana’s Grand Chamberlain. ‘And His Majesty has been informed of everything that has taken place.’

Haruki paused, deploring the feeling that he was keeping the truth from his men.

‘The chain of command has not been disrupted. Nothing that has happened today affects your duty to your division and your emperor. That will be all.’

He didn’t speak of why Nakamori had come to arrest him in the first place. He didn’t mention that the order for summary execution had been handed down by the emperor himself. All of that information was still classified. As long as he made Nakamori seem like he had overstepped his bounds as general, he hoped they would temporarily be in the clear.

What lay beyond was new territory that Haruki couldn’t foresee.

In the meantime, he tried to focus. He wanted to go to the infirmary to check on Klaus and Kolya but there was something else he had to do first. He left Hasebe in charge of the division for the next half hour before he walked back to his office where he had guiltily left Kaiser on the floor beneath his jade jacket.

* * *

_LUCKENWALDE, THREE YEARS AGO_

‘I can’t believe you left the sky behind for this,’ Ryoumei declared.

‘What’s wrong with tanks?’ Haruki countered with a smile.

‘Nothing, if you don’t mind crawling around the ground in oversized beetles.’

‘Those oversized beetles can withstand grenades and overhead missiles.’

Ryoumei gave him a sideways glance that Haruki missed. He knew the real reason Haruki had applied to study at Luckenwalde. Haruki had admitted his secret a few years ago. Out of respect for him, Ryoumei didn’t bring it up again.

‘Whatever. Don’t get jealous when I’m cutting arcs in the sky without you.’

They left the school by the main gates and Haruki nodded at Otto, the guard on duty.

‘Not that I’m complaining,’ Ryoumei went on, fishing a smoke out of his pocket. ‘Without you, I’m the best pilot at the base in Shikoku. They think I’m a king over there. Thank God they’ve never seen you fly.’

Haruki grinned again. ‘Well, I’m glad you left your kingdom behind to visit me.’

Ryoumei grunted as he lit up.

Over two months had passed since they had last seen each other. They had parted ways at the end of flight school; Ryoumei taking up a post as a fighter jet instructor back in the east, and Haruki opting to remain in the west for another year, this time in Luckenwalde. Both had been privately worried that the distance between them – the first of its kind since they were children – would mean the end of their friendship, but time proved them wrong.

They talked lightly as they walked. Haruki planned to treat him to a bratwurst lunch since it was the one thing Ryoumei claimed to miss about the west.

And as he turned the corner, he caught sight of a familiar outline by the bus stop. A large dog with matted black-and-tan fur and hazel eyes. Its ears pricked up when it caught sight of Haruki.

‘Kaiser’s here again,’ Haruki said.

‘Who?’

‘A stray,’ Haruki said, pointing. ‘He’s been here for years, apparently. The locals even named him.’

‘Ugh. It looks like a huge drowned rat.’

They drew up near the bus shelter where Kaiser sat on his left haunch, head drooping slightly. Haruki knelt by the dog, ignoring its strong smell. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m telling you now, if that thing attacks you, I’m not taking you to the hospital until after I get lunch. I haven’t eaten since the train.’

‘He wouldn’t attack anyone. Would you, Kaiser?’

A few tentative thumps of its matted tail. Hazel eyes watching him happily, but with a mistrustful glance being spared every now and then at Ryoumei.

‘Don’t you get tired of only seeing the good in everyone?’ Ryoumei said, blowing smoke in an impatient gust. ‘And every _thing,’_ he amended with another glance at the mutt. ‘One day that’s going to come back and hit you in the face, mark my words.’

‘I don’t think he’s always been a stray,’ Haruki said, apparently having tuned Ryoumei out. ‘He’s too well-built for that, don’t you think? I think he’s been abandoned.’

‘Well-built? Are we looking at the same drowned rat?’ Ryoumei quipped. He noticed a few glances being thrown their way as Haruki knelt by the mongrel. They already stood out as the only two easterners in Luckenwalde.

‘I bet we’d be surprised what he looks like after a bath and a good meal.’ Haruki scratched beneath the dog’s jaw. ‘I’ll bring him back some bratwurst,’ he decided.

‘I hope you're planning to wash your hands before you eat.’

An hour later, after a generous bratwurst helping had been left by the bus shelter, Haruki and Ryoumei returned to the front gates of the school. There, Otto told them that animals weren’t allowed on the premises.

‘What?’

They turned to see Kaiser standing behind them. He wagged his tail a few times, hopeful eyes staring into Haruki’s.

Ryoumei gave an irritated sigh. ‘See? This is what happens when you go around trying to rescue every abandoned dog in the west.’

But Haruki, who had seen something in the dog’s hazel eyes, had already decided. He asked Otto if the dog could stay there. Otto uncomfortably replied that the Brass would never let a stray stay near the front gate. But, by grace of his friendship with Haruki, he reluctantly showed him a barely-used side gate with a small, sheltered alcove.

And there Kaiser remained for a full year. After he had first followed Haruki to the gates of Luckenwalde, Haruki paid for grooming and a trip to the vet and ensured that his makeshift kennel was stocked when he wasn’t around.

Kaiser waited patiently for Haruki by the side gate – and the front gate when the soldiers there were friendly – and happily followed Haruki whenever he went into town. And whenever Haruki opened a letter from the Shikoku air defence base, he smiled at how Ryoumei always made sure to ask after the huge drowned rat in his postscripts.

And on the day that Haruki left Luckenwalde to catch the train that would take him to the east, there was no question that Kaiser would go with him.

* * *

When Klaus found him an hour or so later, Haruki was asleep on top of the covers in bed, tie loosened and still in his uniform. Dusk had barely fallen.

Klaus sat on the edge of the mattress and watched him sleep, remembering a time when he had walked in to see Taki in a similar state. He tried to imagine everything the young commander had been through that day.

He had felt utterly useless earlier as he lay in the infirmary and waited for a glorified headache to recede. The compress had helped, as did the pills that the nurse handed him. It managed to irritate him even more than the countless other injuries he had received in his life. It was internal. Something with no visible scar or entry point or something that would be healed over. Its unpredictability unsettled him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he had also watched Suguri wrap a bandage around Kolya’s arm. Yet again, there hadn't been an ounce of emotion on the Eurotean’s face. Klaus felt even more annoyed at himself and his far less visible injury.

He thought of how Kolya had barely paused after being shot. He remembered the bullet slicing through his own arm in Thermopylae. How he had been completely immobilised for long seconds afterwards and only Ota’s voice calling to him had forced him to move his legs.

Perhaps that was it, Klaus decided. Perhaps the adrenaline and the knowledge that Haruki was in danger had been enough for Kolya to keep moving as though nothing had happened. But his unflinching, deadpan face left an impression, even from across the infirmary. He knew that the time would come for him to ask Haruki about him. But enough had happened for one day.

Still, when Klaus reached out and ran a hand through Haruki’s hair, he realised he was guiltily hoping to wake him.

He did. And Haruki's eyes softened when they landed on him. He smiled. When Klaus leaned down and kissed him, he felt Haruki’s arms close around him with ease. It always happened so easily, Klaus thought. As though it wasn’t defying an unspoken law somewhere that Klaus could still feel in his gut.

And then Haruki had pulled away, just slightly, and his eyes took Klaus in, his hands holding Klaus’ face, fingers at his temples like they had been in the aftermath of Hokane.

‘Klaus,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m kind of tired.’

The peace and silence of the room seemed implausible. Sacrilegious, almost. Compared to the chaos of everything else that had happened in the past few days. The men who had died in Hokane. The men lying injured in the infirmary. Kaiser.

‘It's okay. Me too,’ Klaus realised.

Haruki suddenly seemed unsure beneath him. It seemed like they were somewhere new. New territory, just like everything else.

‘Can I stay?’ Klaus then asked, after only a moment’s thought.

A question which the room had heard before, but only in the previous war.

And the look of surprise on Haruki’s face, visible even in the dark, brought about a new sort of guilt.

‘I – yeah. Of course.’

As Haruki kicked himself for the awkwardness of his answer, Klaus slipped off his shoes and lay down heavily on the left side of the bed with half an arm’s length between them. He let out a long sigh.

Heart suddenly hammering, Haruki turned his head but Klaus’ eyes were already closed. Haruki hesitated.

‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Yeah.’

A small pause. Haruki wondered again. Whether he dared to move closer. Whether he ought to refrain and take it as a sign that Klaus had chosen to lie where he was.

‘I checked your office and the general meeting room before coming here,’ Klaus said sleepily. ‘I was worried for a second you’d snuck out to offer yourself up to the capital.’

Haruki hesitated. The thought did cross his mind.

‘Hey,’ Klaus warned. ‘We need you, Commander. Hasebe even defied the goddamn general for you. You can’t skip out on us now.’

‘I won’t,’ Haruki promised. He didn’t know what would happen next, but abandoning his men, even to protect them, didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

Klaus turned his head and looked at him through the gloom.

‘Sorry about Kaiser, kid. He was a fucking ace of a dog. Easily my favourite of your three.’

That brought about the smallest of smiles.

‘Did you bury him?’

Haruki thought of the upturned earth at the base of the tree and the maiden grass dipping in the breeze.

‘Yeah. In Watanabe’s little... corner.’

Klaus remembered the day Kaiser had led him there. The pale, wheat-like grass and yellow flowers.

‘Good call,’ he said.

There was a gentle silence.

‘I never asked how you found him,’ Klaus said.

After a pause, Haruki began relaying the story and his smile gradually widened as he did so. The images came back to him along with the smell of bratwurst and the gentle bustle of the streets of Luckenwalde.

‘Ryoumei acts tough,’ Klaus said, when Haruki finished. ‘But I bet he’ll cry like a little girl if you tell him what just happened.’

Haruki smiled and privately agreed.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Klaus said after a pause, remembering the way Kaiser had flown for the nearest guard.

Haruki’s smile went away. He thought of the dog with the matted fur. The tentative way he had wagged his tail when Haruki turned to him in surprise at the gates of the school. He realised how much better off Kaiser would have been if he had remained at the bus shelter that day.

‘He followed me here because he trusted me to keep him safe,’ he said, his voice low.

‘No, he followed you because he wanted to follow you. Trust me.’

Haruki remained unconvinced.

Klaus' thoughts lingered on the fallen Kaiser. Kaiser, who had been given something he hadn't even been looking for. A second chance with a master who had slowly healed the pain of his past. His throat suddenly closed with an emotion that he didn’t understand.  
  
_He'd thank you if he could,_ Klaus was on the point of saying. But he didn’t. He was worried the kid would see through him.  
  
'Thank you,' Haruki said suddenly, as though he had taken the words from Klaus' mind.  
  
Klaus lifted his eyebrows. 'What for?'  
  
Haruki hesitated.   
  
For the day he turned up at the division, his arm in a sling. For training his men. For charging ahead of him to help him win his battles. For his voice on the radio when Haruki had to make a call in defiance of headquarters. For standing between Haruki and the men who wanted to hurt him. For being in his bed at that moment.  
  
'All of it,' he said.

The quiet firmness of his voice made Klaus open his eyes again. Through the gloom, Haruki saw the small curve of his smile.

Klaus then reached an arm across the bed and found Haruki’s hand. He brought it to his lips and kissed the back of it.

‘Whatever you say, Commander.’

Even though he released Haruki’s hand afterwards and closed his eyes, Haruki’s pulse was loud in his ears. He still felt Klaus’ lips on the back of his hand. He flushed in the darkness and was glad that Klaus couldn’t see him.

He had seen Klaus do that to Taki on the outset of a deadly mission. He remembered how even back then, before any of the confusing, churning feelings had begun, that gesture had left a real imprint. He remembered Taki’s poised, purposeful stare as Klaus had kissed his hand. He realised his own reaction had been a pathetic imitation of it.

But it barely seemed to matter. Klaus seemed unaware of how much the gesture had affected him.

Soon, Klaus’ breathing was steady. His hand lay only a few inches from Haruki’s. With a great deal of self-restraint, Haruki brought his own away, as though worried he would cave to the temptation to touch him again. He slowly turned on his side to look at Klaus, his guilt pushed to the background by happiness. A simple happiness that was cautious and hopeful. He watched Klaus sleep until he drifted off himself.

One step forward. He hoped the step back wouldn’t happen for a while.

The following morning, even the tentative peace they created in that room came to an unceremonious end. They both started awake when a sergeant rapped on the door and urgently informed the commander that Tachibana was here to see them.

* * *

In the sergeant’s urgency, he had failed to mention a key piece of information. In fact, the visitor turned out not to be the emperor but his son, Douman.

Haruki received him in the general meeting room in the main building. The young Tachibana turned to him. Klaus tried to remember what he could from a day on the Reizen grounds a lifetime ago. Since then, Douman resembled his father even less. A fierce, earnest face and a strong frame beneath a strict samurai-like cut of robes. Eyes that simmered.

And standing next to him was Rudi. Klaus blinked, suddenly wondering if he could remember a time when the silent, unassuming Rudi hadn’t caught him off guard. They had brought three others with them who wore robes and demeanours of attendants, presumably from the Reizen residence.

Haruki and Rudi exchanged a quick smile that recalled an afternoon spent on the wheat fields, working on a stubborn combine.

When the front gates had announced the arrival of the emperor’s son, several of the officers had gathered, including Hasebe and Aizawa. The latter had been increasingly agitated over the events of the past few days and didn’t know what Douman’s visit entailed.

Kolya, who had waited by the door, was grateful to be able to take his place at Haruki’s side again. Though his arm appeared to be heavily bandaged beneath his sleeve, Klaus noticed that it wasn’t in a sling and, moreover, appeared to be fully functional.

‘Haruki-san,’ Douman began. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

‘What can I do for you?’ Haruki said cautiously.

‘I was hoping to speak to you about something urgent.’ Douman then glanced around the fairly crowded meeting room. ‘Something confidential.’

Haruki spared a glance at Aizawa, who was the only man in the room he didn’t trust. But it would be conspicuous indeed to send him away alone.

‘Everyone here has the highest security clearance in the division,’ Haruki said carefully. ‘You can speak freely.’

Douman seemed to hesitate.

‘It might sound presumptuous, Haruki-san, but I would appreciate if you would clear the room, barring those in your counsel you consider to be essential.’

Given Douman’s status, it didn’t, in fact, seem overly presumptuous. Haruki glanced at a handful and dismissed the rest. Aizawa, who hadn’t received a nod from the commander, fumed in silence for a moment before he pushed his glasses up his nose and left. The door closed after him.

With only Klaus, Kolya and Hasebe near him, Haruki turned to Douman expectantly.

‘How interesting,’ said a new voice.

It took everyone in the room a moment to realise it was one of the attendants who had spoken. He stepped out and drew alongside Douman.

And he suddenly seemed familiar.

‘When asked to select the men who are the most essential to you, you picked an easterner, a westerner and a Eurotean.’

It was a voice they had heard through the radio and a face they had seen in the papers. He was almost unrecognisable in traditional eastern robes and coiffe instead of the western-style coat and vest and boots for which he was famous.

Shoda smiled at them serenely.

‘I think we made the right decision in coming to you.’

* * *

Both Klaus and Kolya’s hands went to their guns when they recognised the leader of the _Hitobito._ But Douman had seen that reaction coming and he stepped forwards with his arms outstretched.

‘Please, there’s no need for that.’

‘Hands on your head, right now!’ said Klaus, gun pointed.

Haruki was also alarmed. He stared at the man who had cost him so much, standing before him with barely any guards between them.

‘You can place me under arrest immediately, Commander,’ Shoda said, calmly complying with Klaus' order, his voice maintaining a cadence that was almost musical. ‘Or you can hear me out before doing so. I have come here of my own free will, with no tricks or agenda, as you can see. I’m standing with those whom I hoped you trust enough to vouch for me,’ he added, indicating Rudi who stood a little ways behind him.

Haruki glanced from one to the other, trying and failing to understand.

‘I find it hard to believe you would be here without an agenda,’ he said tersely.

Shoda laughed lightly.

‘How right you are. I should be more careful of my phrasing. I come here with nothing but an agenda. But an open one,’ he said, opening his empty hands. ‘I have risked everything to come here like this, as you can probably imagine.’

‘Don’t believe him, sir,’ Hasebe said at once.

‘I don’t,’ Haruki said, his voice colder than Klaus had ever heard it.

Haruki stared at the leader of the revolution and he could only think of the way that Ao’s mother had smiled at him before breaking down into tears.

But he swallowed and glanced at Douman, son of the emperor himself, who Haruki knew had married Taki’s sister and managed Taki’s estate. And Haruki looked again at Rudi, who had blushed when he asked Haruki what it meant to be a knight.

And so he wavered just slightly, even though his every instinct was telling him to take Shoda into custody.

‘Say what you have to say here,’ Haruki said.

‘Kid,’ Klaus said in warning.

‘You can say what you want here,’ Haruki continued. ‘Before you’re taken into the holding cells, where you will take part in negotiations to end the current hostilities between our nation and your movement.’

‘I have actually come in the hopes that you might join our movement.’

Silence.

Haruki suddenly recalled the voice that had spoken to him at the outset of their first battle in Hokane. The voice that had told them to let the _Hitobito_ take the city. To let Tachibana know that his reign was being threatened.

But he tried to focus.

Shoda lowered his hands and glanced around calmly at their faces and at the guns that were still drawn. He was smaller than his photos in the newspapers had led Klaus to believe. Narrow eyes and high cheekbones almost reminded him of Meiji. But there was a strange twist in the corners of his lips that was either shrewd or cruel or intelligent and Klaus didn’t know which.

‘May I sit, Commander?’ Shoda asked, indicating the chairs around the large table.

‘No,’ Haruki said.

Shoda smiled, as though he knew he’d been pushing it. ‘That’s fair.’

* * *

Twenty minutes later, the pain in Klaus’ head had swelled and receded several times over. At times, he was worried that it was obvious to others, but luckily everyone in the general meeting room seemed engrossed in the highly unreal and highly dangerous conversation taking place with the leader of the revolution.

The part that made his pulse surge strongest was when Shoda had the gall to apologise to Haruki about his burns.

‘I hear you were injured quite severely in that attack, Commander,’ Shoda said. ‘I must mention that such specific assassination attempts took place when my predecessor was in charge. Ever since I took over, we focused our energies elsewhere.’

‘Like putting civilians in harm’s way as you took over their cities?’

‘Casualties are an unfortunate reality in –’

‘Hang on a second,’ Klaus said suddenly. Haruki might have been quick to forgive his ordeal in the burning jeep but Klaus was not. ‘You can’t just breeze over all the things you’ve done like they don’t mean anything. If your attack on the convoy had succeeded, you’d be talking to Haruki’s replacement not Haruki.’

‘True,’ Shoda said without missing a beat. ‘Which is why it was an artful stroke of fate that he survived.’

Kolya glowered, remembering all too vividly the way he had carried a barely conscious Haruki out of the wreckage of the jeep.

‘Speaking of fate,’ Shoda said, before Klaus could reply. ‘Everything that has happened so far points to you, Commander.’

‘Me?’

‘You, and this division. We know of the kinds of weapons you’ve been forced to wield. We know that Hokane only stands now thanks to your good grace.’

‘Right,’ Klaus said testily. ‘So because Haruki showed a little leniency, you think he’ll switch sides at the drop of a hat.’

‘What I _think_ is that if there is any good left in our Imperial Armed Forces, it most likely resides here.’

It was something Klaus couldn’t refute.

‘Listen,’ Shoda said, a touch more solemnly. He took a few ruminative steps forward. ‘I know of the history of this division. I know the harm that has been caused by enemies presenting themselves to you as friends.' He looked directly at Klaus and Hasebe. 'Lieutenant General Hans Regenwalde nearly cost you and your previous commander everything.'  
  
Klaus was taken aback, both by the mention of Hans and the frankness of the observation.  
  
'So I can understand if your distrust is even greater than others'. But I hope that you might be more persuaded to join our cause if you know some of the other players, in addition to the fine men I stand alongside here.’

Douman revealed that he had been working with Shoda for years in order to dethrone his father. Though he had been too afraid to tell his wife or family for their own safety, he had also recently brought Rudi into the movement, trusting his dedication to Midori.

‘Who are the other players you’re talking about?’ Hasebe asked.

The extent of the revolution shocked the members of the Fifteenth Armoured Division. Klaus learned, to his consternation, that the Western Alliance had, in fact, been funding the _Hitobito_ in order to dethrone the east’s war-hungry emperor.

‘They're losing on the Western Front,’ Shoda said crisply. ‘They need Tachibana dethroned simply to ensure the security of their own nations. High-ranking officials in each of the Western Alliance nations are working closely with us. Ambassador Gregor Feulner is a personal friend of mine and he sends his regards,’ he added. ‘As does Emmerich von Wolfstadt.’

Klaus turned sharply.

‘I assured him I would check up on his younger brother while I was here,’ Shoda said with a small curl of a smile. ‘Make sure he’s behaving.’

'You don't want Emmerich on your side,’ Klaus said guardedly. ‘He can't see anything past his country.'  
  
'Indeed, he is quite the patriot. And, as I said, it is in his country's interests that your emperor be dethroned.' He fixed Klaus with a look. 'You and your brother were once on the same side, were you not? Before you threw away old allegiances for the sake of a young prince of the east?'

Haruki felt a small surge in his stomach as he watched Klaus.

'In a different life,' Klaus said, his voice stiff. ‘My brother and I haven’t spoken in years.’  
  
'Well, perhaps now is the time to mend that bridge. This new young prince might be the reason that old allegiances are forged rather than broken.’

Haruki thought Shoda was talking about Douman and was startled to see that Shoda was looking directly at him.

_Young prince?_

‘Commander, you have lost a great deal by my hand,' Shoda said. 'And I will not demean your standing or mine as men of war by apologising for it. Just as I don't expect you to apologise for the countless deaths you have inflicted on my own men. That is simply the nature of the game.'  
  
'One which you started,' Haruki reminded him.  
  
'One which Tachibana started when he took the throne.' He held Haruki’s gaze. 'You must have considered something like this yourself. Challenging him. Perhaps even letting us win.'  
  
Haruki faltered there again.

Though he had shown a sliver of weakness, and he knew Shoda had seen it too, the leader of the _Hitobito_ suddenly shifted gears. He spoke in almost clinical terms. He spoke of colonels and commanders in the military they already had on board. How many of the other divisions they could potentially count on. He emphasised, time and time again, that this was unprecedented. New territory. Never before had a nation’s revolution tried to use the army itself to take back their nation.

As the conversation went on, they were also reminded of Shoda himself and his background. His proficiency in language and combat had made him a lieutenant general and a translator in the first and second wars.

By then, Shoda had in fact taken a seat on one of the chairs around the table. Haruki's distrust had lessened enough to allow it, though he and everyone else in the room remained standing.  
  
'I consider myself a worldly man, and a man of the world,’ Shoda said, in reply to Haruki’s guarded question about his motives and his past. ‘I have adopted the mannerisms of other cultures while retaining my own. They call me the Western Samurai as a slight but I consider it to be a badge of pride. It never made sense to me why our nation should be so removed from the rest of the world.’  
  
Haruki blinked. He recognised the words as his own but when exactly he had uttered them he couldn't say.  
  
‘In any case, the revolution isn't about me, or even the army. It's about the people gaining back power for themselves.’ Then it appeared his own words made him think of something. ‘Klaus and Kolya,’ he said suddenly, sweeping his eyes from one to the other. ‘Two men from far corners of the world, come together at the behest of one in the east.’

They both bristled slightly in the pause that followed. It felt as though Shoda was measuring them in a way they couldn’t perceive.

‘I wonder if you know that your names share the same derivation?’ Shoda said lightly.

‘The hell are you talking about?’ Klaus said, sounding wary rather than annoyed.

‘Klaus and Kolya share the same meaning,’ Shoda patiently clarified, again wearing the faintest of smiles.

‘What, _the people’s victory?’_ Klaus said, nonplussed. He then looked at Kolya, who met his gaze looking very mildly surprised.

After a few more seconds, it sank in.

‘We have the same name,’ Klaus said, managing, that time, to sound annoyed.

Haruki looked at them both, a little startled.

‘A simple coincidence,’ Shoda went on. ‘But one that is made slightly more interesting when you consider that we called our revolution the _Hitobito no Shori_.’

_Victory of the people._

It took Klaus a moment. He had known the meaning since he first heard of the revolution over a year ago, but he had somehow never made that particular connection.

‘In one way or another, it appears that the three of us stand for the same thing. The people’s victory.’ Shoda turned his eyes back to Haruki. ‘And the light that will shine the way.’

‘Save it,’ Klaus was quick to interject, irritated by how skilfully Shoda wound meaningless rhetoric and symbolism into his campaigns. ‘We’re not going to join the goddamn revolution just because of one of your pretty speeches.’

But Shoda had honed in on Haruki, who, moments ago, had shown a crack in his armour.

‘Just think, Commander. How many atrocities across history could have been prevented if the _army_ – the only real means by which despots and dictators are able to reign – simply refused?’

Haruki hesitated. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘No. Reality is never that simple.’

‘The people didn’t choose us, not like they chose their leaders.’

‘The people didn’t choose Tachibana,’ Shoda pointed out swiftly. ‘And neither, might I add, did the gods. Whatever the reason was for power to be transferred from Meiji-sama to Tachibana, we doubt it occurred in a way that would be condoned by either man or god.’

The thought of Meiji, the memory of his reign and the suddenness of his abdication, played on everyone’s minds.

‘So you’re right, Commander. Reality is never that simple. But in the end, all of that complexity boils down to a simple choice. Your choice.’

Klaus saw that Haruki’s hands were in fists, his gaze absently out the window where the heat was bearing down.

In a voice that was almost gentle, Shoda drove his point home.

‘Aren't you tired of losing your men and your people in a struggle you don't even believe in?’

The silence that followed was one which the compound, and that room, knew well; the kind that determined the fate of nations.

* * *

Feeling numb and overwhelmed, Haruki left the room with his men on his heels. Shoda had stepped back into the guise of an attendant when two soldiers were brought in to keep an eye on the party.  
  
They remained silent until they reached Haruki’s office. And then as soon as the door was closed, opinions rang out, visceral and adamant. Haruki remained silent, glad to have both Klaus and Hasebe's voices in his ear. They spoke of different things.  
  
Hasebe spoke of how impossible it was to trust a man like Shoda. How impossible it would be to ask the men of the division to cast off the duty that had been instilled in them over years – generations – and turn their guns on the capital itself.  
  
Klaus disagreed almost completely; he believed the majority of the division, if not all of it, would follow Haruki. He instead spoke of the dangers of going against the capital. How Haruki and the division itself might be in harm's way if mutiny was declared.  
  
And Haruki learned more in terms of what they didn't say. Neither of them said that what Shoda or the _Hitobito_ was doing was wrong. Neither said that the revolution ought to be stopped and that the emperor's rule ought to be protected.

Kolya remained by the door and said nothing.

When there was a lull in Klaus and Hasebe’s argument, they glared at each other and then looked at the commander, who had wandered to his desk and was leaning against it. His eyes were out the window again.

_When you're torn between the duty you've been trained to believe in and what you feel to be right... how do you choose? When they're completely at odds?_

Klaus was frustrated to discover that his head was tingling with a new but already familiar pain. He blinked through it.

Haruki’s mind, meanwhile, was on a conversation he had had with someone whose firm, steady voice he could still hear clearly.

_You serve the emperor. That's the only way it works. That's the only way the military chain of command works. Anything that veers away from that, even slightly, is mutiny and treason._

_And mutiny should only be considered if the people you fight for are at stake._

‘When I spoke to Taki-sama,’ Haruki said finally. ‘He told me that we serve the emperor, but that our only real duty is to our people.’

Hearing Haruki speak of Taki, of something the two of them had shared, somehow made Klaus even more aware of the pain in his head. But he held Haruki’s gaze when he looked round. And Hasebe did too.

It seemed the three of them had converged on the same answer but they weren’t ready, yet, to yield.  
  
‘Hypothetically,’ Haruki said, as he stepped back into the general meeting room.

Shoda rose at once and Douman and Rudi glanced up as well.

‘Hypothetically,’ Haruki repeated. ‘If we are to agree, what would that mean? What would come next?’

Though he didn’t smile, Shoda’s eyes seemed to flash. He raised his chin and stepped forwards, indicating for one of the two attendants to step forward. He brought out documents. Maps and missives and plans.

And he adopted that business-like tone that Haruki heard once before. It came as a strange sort of relief to know that Shoda knew when to, and when not to, use his silver tongue.

‘First, we need to find and bring Meiji-sama back,’ Shoda said. ‘Thanks to Douman, we have a good idea of where he might be.’  
  
‘We have a winter residence in our province, close to the sea and the land-bridge,’ Douman said, unrolling a map. ‘My father hasn’t used it in years but we’ve found out that the security there has doubled over the past three years.’

Klaus looked over the plans and recognised the lay of the land. The land-bridge and the ocean. Meiji had sent him and Taki there to break into Tachibana’s warehouse. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Shoda was still speaking.  
  
‘In the meantime, you should petition Tachibana to bring back the division to its full strength. Send back troops from the Western Front. Emmerich von Wolfstadt will thank you for that.’

Klaus grunted. Haruki almost smiled.  
  
_Mutiny_   _should only be considered if the people you fight for are at stake. Yo_ _u serve the emperor, but your only real duty is to your people._

As Shoda spoke, and as Haruki slowly began to understand everything it would take to pull it off, his mind was still buzzing with Taki’s voice.

_The people of your province and your estate. Your men on the field and their families back home._

‘Once we have the rightful emperor and enough manpower at the division and enough support from the nation…’ Shoda straightened with a flourish. ‘We can take back the capital.’  
  
_They’ve put their trust in you. They’re the ones you’re fighting for._  
  
The people’s victory. And the light that would shine the way.

At some point while Shoda was speaking, Haruki and Klaus locked eyes.

Though it would take days for their new stance against the capital, this historically unprecedented move, to be made clear, Haruki knew as soon as he looked at Klaus that they had already decided.

* * *

Klaus stood beneath the running water in his shower, feeling the drops fall onto his head with a new sensitivity he didn’t like. He tried to reflect on the long, unreal day that had followed. 

By then, dusk had fallen and Shoda had left. Douman and Rudi gave their thanks to Haruki for the incredible faith he had placed in them. They knew it was well within commander’s right to have them all charged with treason on the spot. Shoda's last words to Haruki were that he would await an answer.  
  
The pulsing little beads of pain in his skull got worse the longer he stood there. He tried to think of Haruki, almost as though his mind had mapped out a sure-fire way of feeling better.

But by the time he had stepped out of the bathroom and the pain gradually worsened, he was brought back to something else. Something internal. Something with no visible scar or entry point. Something that wouldn’t just heal over. An unpredictability that unsettled him.

Taki.

Taki’s pain. The one Klaus couldn’t reach. The splitting headaches and the pain in his bones. And suddenly, no matter how hard Klaus tried, he couldn’t think of Haruki to help him feel better. He could only think of Taki and Taki’s pain and how useless he had been to Taki as he suffered, how little he had done, and how much he was impugning Taki's memory now, all he had been through.

He lay there for long enough that the pain in his skull became another reminder from the gods. That pain brought him closer to Taki.

It reminded him that he could no longer fool himself about what he was doing with Haruki. He thought of how he had felt that morning when he awoke to see Haruki’s sleeping face on the other side of the bed, both of them still wearing their uniforms and exhausted. He recalled the previous night and realised he had kissed Haruki’s hand for the first time.

He wasn’t using Haruki in order to find Taki any longer. He went to Haruki because he wanted to. Because he wanted Haruki. He wanted to bask in his touch and his smile and his gaze.

But the pain in his head, the strange things that it was doing to his hearing, like he was again out there beside the blast as it happened, reminded him of what his reality was. And again he found himself resenting Haruki for something that wasn’t at all his fault. For letting him absorb those small moments of happiness.

And when it all came to a point, he took the last vial he had. Just the very last one, just to help himself out. Just so he didn’t have to face Suguri.

As it entered his body, he thought about the vows he had made on a pier. He thought of how far Rudi had gone for his mistress – as far as joining the revolution in a country that wasn’t his own. A bond that would last until death.

Until death.

One death? Or both?

Surely both.

Both.

* * *

Suguri was unnerved.

First by Nakamori’s foreboding appearance at the compound with members of the Imperial Guard. And then with Nakamori’s prompt eviction and arrest. And Haruki’s words to the division, reassuring and decisive though they were for the rest of his men, had left Suguri anxious.

He didn’t know about Shoda or the tentative alliance he had recently forged with Haruki. But he had gathered enough over the past two days to be nervous about what was to come.

He thought of the letter that sat in his desk drawer. The one that Taki had left for Klaus and which urged him to do unwise things. Things which, if read now, would hurtle their young commander and their division into a bloodbath against the capital. He had read it two years ago on an impulse. And it was on that same impulse that he had decided to go against Taki’s wishes and keep it for himself.

Now, with the compound and the nation in the state it was in, he was grateful for having done so. He hoped the commander would come to his senses.

And so when someone knocked on his office door an hour or so after dusk, he let out a grunt from emotions that had already wound tight over the past few days.

Wolfstadt stood on his doorstep with rolled sleeves and slightly wan, unfocused eyes. Suguri immediately recognised the effects of morphine.  
  
‘Could you help me out, doc?’ said Klaus, wincing slightly. ‘The pain isn't going away.'  
  
Only the oath he had taken as a doctor moved Suguri to stand aside and let him in.  
  
'You're a disgrace,' Suguri said a few minutes later, in the quiet of his office.  
  
_What else is new?_ Klaus thought tiredly as he sat on the chair by the desk.  
  
Suguri fished out a compress from a drawer and told him to hold it to his head. He then rifled through the medicine he had for the pills. But even as he turned, he knew Wolfstadt had a reason for showing up at his office and not the infirmary.  
  
'Got anything stronger?' His voice was close to being sheepish. 'I don't know if the pills will cut it this time.'  
  
Something to help me forget the pain. To help me stop thinking about the past. To focus on what's in front of me before I lose sight of it again. Haruki.  
  
Suguri stared.  
  
'Have you no shame?'  
  
'Cut me a break just this once, doc –'  
  
'No shame,' Suguri said, his voice rising slowly. 'Coming in here already high and asking for more. You shouldn't be here if you can't control yourself.'  
  
Klaus hung his head and squeezed his eyes shut against the throbbing.  
  
'Suguri –'  
  
'The commander trusts you when he makes his decisions,' Suguri said, his eyes narrow and cold. 'Just like Taki-sama did. And he'll make the same mistakes.'  
  
_Your influence is the last thing he needs._  
  
When Klaus stared again he managed to salvage the smallest flicker of indignation.  
  
'That's enough already,' he said, raising his voice slightly. 'Taki – he never made mistakes because of me.'  
  
Suguri's anger threatened to spill over. He thought of the blade of Taki's katana slicing through Berkut's hand.  
  
'You made him reckless as a commander. Reckless and – and foolish!' Suguri took a few steps away, knowing he had to calm himself but letting his suppressed anger take its course. He turned back around to Klaus who sat there silently and bore it. 'You made him throw away his whole life for you.'  
  
'That was – that was Taki's decision. I didn't –'

'He was blinded by you! The things he did for you –' He paused abruptly and grit his teeth against the memory. 'The hardest thing I've ever had to do is sit in front of that door in the basement while Taki... while he let you do all those terrible things...'  
  
Klaus stared in confusion.  
  
'What do you –? What are you talking about?'  
  
The look in Suguri's eye shifted slightly. It was still cold but now it held a strange, contemptuous sympathy.  
  
'He never told you? He never told you about what happened after you got back from No Man's Land barely alive?'  
  
Klaus heard a distant keening in his ears along with his pulse. He knew Suguri was about to open a dark door that ought to remain closed.  
  
'All those drugs, enough to knock you out of consciousness, but you were still in pain. And Taki-sama... he just wanted to help you.'  
  
Klaus took in heavy breaths. His mind was spinning.  
  
'The sacrifices he made... the unspeakable things he let you do... And _you_ –' The word was like a blade. 'All you did was devour him.'  
  
The bites that left deep marks in white skin. The fingers digging into flesh. Taki groaning and clenching his teeth and tears leaking onto the bed. Klaus remembered none of it.  
  
'I told you...' Klaus said in a voice that was nearly a whisper. 'I _ordered_ you not to let him... not to let him near me.'  
  
A flash of guilt. And then it was gone. Suguri would be damned before he let Klaus make him feel guilty for anything.  
  
All you did was devour him.  
  
Like the last time Suguri had picked him clean, Klaus could hardly remember much else until he was in his shed. He remembered leaving Suguri's office and going to the infirmary, breaking into the supplies closet and grabbing, again with shaking hands, vials of morphine and amphetamines. His promise to Haruki suddenly meant nothing.  
  
The needle piercing his skin felt like the harsh but fair voice of an old friend reprimanding him for not having visited in so long.  
  
But even when the inside of his shed began to spin around him and an icy liquid filled his veins, still Suguri's voice wouldn't go away, and neither would Taki's lifeless face in the blue light of dawn.  
  
All you did was devour him.

* * *

Haruki was called to the main gate when he was told that a mysterious gift had arrived. He didn’t know what to think when he saw the familiar colour and shape of Klaus’ motorbike – his first one. The one he had abandoned by the broken hull of Murakumo.

The guard said it had been delivered by a stranger, along with a note.

Haruki read the artistic strokes of the kanji and knew immediately who must have written it.

_‘To the Captain, with my apologies. We hope you see this as an attempt to make amends. –S’_

Haruki stared at the bike, perplexed. For all of Shoda’s meticulous planning and research into their division, he was still shocked that he could have known this was Klaus’ bike.

The guards said it had been checked for explosives and seemed clean. They were confused by the half-smile on their commander’s face, and the fact that he wished to deliver it to the captain himself. Haruki dismissed Kolya for the day and made him promise to get his arm checked before turning in.

He left the bike near the front step of Klaus’ shed before he knocked.

And he knew something was wrong as soon as he heard the muffled response.

It was a bleakly familiar sight that awaited within.

But there was a strange new gleam in Klaus’ blood-shot eyes.

It made Haruki’s pulse pick up immediately. Klaus was sitting up against the headboard, syringes and string scattered on the bed. But the look in his eye and the way his chest was rising and falling told Haruki that his wasn’t the same as the morphine slump he had witnessed earlier in the year.

‘Klaus –’

‘Did Suguri send you?’ Klaus said. Haruki heard the strangeness in his voice. A huskiness that was almost grating.

‘Suguri? No, I –’

‘That bastard won’t leave me alone.’

Haruki went to his side and checked his eyes and wrist. His pupils were dilated and his pulse racing. Klaus remained still but the way he was watching Haruki made him feel a strange ripple of nervousness.

‘What did you take?’ Haruki said finally.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Klaus said, his eyes half-lidded but unblinkingly fixed on Haruki. ‘The pain in my head’s not going away.’

Haruki stared back, heart heavy.

‘You said you wouldn’t do this anymore.’

Klaus’ gaze was impassive. ‘Then this is just another vow I’m breaking.’

_This is just another way I'm letting him down._

And then, suddenly but gently, it was all a bit too much. Ever since Haruki had made the call in Hokane, things seemed to have spiralled, in all directions, without warning or mercy. And seeing Klaus like that was the final straw.

‘I’m getting a nurse,’ he said, his voice breaking just slightly. He got up and walked towards the door. ‘Stay here.’

Klaus saw the empty space where Haruki had been and something told him to bring him back.

‘Wait, wait,’ Klaus mumbled before he got to his feet. ‘Slow down a second.’

Haruki backed up a little when Klaus approached, steadily enough given his state. Haruki felt hands at his waist.

‘Klaus, you – you’re not yourself,’ Haruki tried, trying not to pull away too forcefully.

A quiet laugh with a razor-like edge. 

‘Haven’t you heard? This is the real me, kid.’

_All I did was devour him._

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Haruki firmly, looking him in the eye.

Klaus faltered for a moment. Then he pulled Haruki in and put his mouth to Haruki’s ear. Haruki smelled his scent and the tang of sweat.

‘Did you moan for Kolya the same way you moan for me?’

A flare of shock and hurt. Haruki pulled back to look Klaus in the eye where there was a glint that was both familiar and not.

‘That’s enough,’ he tried, his voice quiet.

‘Did you?’ 

‘Klaus –’

 _‘Did_ you?’ Klaus persisted, still holding Haruki to him and moving towards the wall.

Haruki stared at him for a few seconds, never before realising that it had meant something to Klaus. He clicked his tongue in frustration.

‘It – it wasn’t Kolya.’

Klaus took a second to process this.

‘Who was it, then?’

‘Klaus –’

‘Tell me who it was so I can kill him for having you first.’

‘That’s not funny.’

Klaus gave another small laugh, with none of its usual warmth.

‘When you’re angry, you sound just like him,’ he said in a slow, slurred whisper, his hands on Haruki’s face. ‘Just like Taki.’

Haruki was suddenly struggling to hold back tears.

Klaus had pressed him fully against the wall, his head bent low near Haruki’s ear. He then leaned in to kiss him.

And Haruki abruptly turned his face away.

In the few seconds that followed, Klaus, slightly stunned, breathed in the scent of Haruki’s hair and neck and saw his face in profile. The gaze that was avoiding his, the mouth that was drawn in a thin, unhappy line. And suddenly Klaus was just beyond that wall, in the shower where the water was running, and he was ten years younger watching Taki do the same thing.

After all that time, he still hated when Taki turned from him.

He felt something snap.

* * *

Haruki’s heart was loud and insistent and he was furious with himself for being on the brink of tears and for what he was doing. For pushing Klaus away for the first time.

And so he didn’t at all expect the tight, painful grip on his jaw that forced him to turn his head back, nor the kiss that forced his head back against the wall.

He grunted in surprise and managed to pull away in time to catch his breath before Klaus pushed him hard against the wall once more and kissed him. Klaus held his face there, a strong hand still on his jaw, and licked Haruki’s ear. He felt Klaus’ knee slide between his legs.

‘Go on, spread your legs for me,’ Klaus said. ‘You’re always doing it. You’re always gagging for it. Don’t pretend you don’t want it now.’

The words splintered inside Haruki.

‘Stop,’ he said, shocked to hear that his voice shook. ‘Klaus, get off –’

The energy that was filling Klaus then felt white-hot and electric. He felt it at his fingertips and in his cock. It made him forget the pain. All of his old mistakes. And it fuelled something he had only just learned to tame.

Haruki was disarmed by another kiss and then with no warning he was pulled off the wall and pushed forwards, forcefully, onto the bed. When he turned, Klaus caught his wrists in his powerful grip and kissed him once more.

It was surprisingly how quickly Haruki’s mind abandoned him. How quick he was to tell himself that he was simply about to wake from a strange dream. But his body still struggled. He pulled away from Klaus’ mouth yet again.

‘Stop –’

He caught a glimpse of eyes that were no longer familiar before Klaus turned him over and held him down. That was when Haruki realised then that he had no control over the situation. It was like plunging underwater. Klaus’ strength was no match for his, not like this.

‘You said I could do anything I wanted, remember?’

Klaus’ breathing was uneven and his heart was beating much too fast. The things happening before him were both glaringly vivid and surreal.

Haruki’s face was held to the mattress and his pants pulled down past his hips. It was amazing how the same act, the very same touch, could have transformed so completely into something awful.

‘Klaus, stop! _Stop!’_

He tried to kick Klaus away and one of his feet came close to Klaus’ stomach. Each time he fought back, that same white-hot energy filled Klaus’ head and he pursued that feeling, cornering it down like it was prey. He grabbed Haruki’s legs and pressed between them so he couldn’t lash out again. It made him realise that Taki never put up a fight that day, in that very room.

He spat on his fingers and pushed them in.

The pain was sharp. Haruki felt tears spring at once. He cried out against the mattress.

‘Ugh! Klaus, it hurts…’

But Klaus’ fingers pushed deeper.

‘Don’t you like it when it hurts?’ Klaus hissed, thinking of all the times Haruki had shivered and moaned whenever his skin was marked. Somehow, amid everything else, what he was doing had taken on the thrill of their usual play.

_But you must be careful, Young Master._

When Haruki tried to move again, Klaus took his left arm and twisted it hard behind his back, holding it firmly against Haruki’s spine as he panted and undid his own belt.

_It seems to be the curse of saints…_

Numb disbelief. Tears threatening to spill.

_…to fall into the hands of devils._

He prayed that Klaus would come to his senses before –

And suddenly Klaus’ cock pushed through.

Haruki bit the blankets and managed not to make a sound even as the pain tore through him, immediate and awful and ugly.

Klaus thrust hard, struggling to gain momentum as Haruki was tight and unprepared. Though being inside him had satisfied a visceral need, something in his head and pulsing through his veins was saying it wasn’t enough.

It took him a long time to notice that Haruki wasn’t making any noise at all.

‘What's the matter, kid?’ he breathed.

He still couldn’t hear a thing. He couldn’t see Haruki’s face. His body was starting to open up more and Klaus fucked harder. But Haruki’s silence made him grit his teeth.

‘Say it,’ he hissed.

Past and present mingled until he couldn’t tell them apart.

 _Say it hurts._                                     

And then Haruki turned his head and Klaus saw. The streaming tears and the flushed face. Haruki’s words came to him in a voice Klaus didn’t recognise. A voice that was staggered by pain.

'Klaus, it hurts! Please...'

And there, at long last, it cut through to him.

_That boy looks up to you so much. And you betray him with such depravity._

It happened in slow bursts, so the horror of what he did took a while to catch up.

He let go of Haruki’s arm and pulled out. Haruki sagged onto the bed, making small sounds and holding his left arm to his chest. Less than a minute had passed since Klaus kissed him against the wall. And suddenly the world had been turned on its head.

Klaus reached for him numbly, reaching past the white-hot energy that was being drained out of him slowly.

'Haruki...'

Haruki flinched and drew away.

And Klaus would never forget the way Haruki looked at him then.

* * *

Even as Haruki pulled away from Klaus’ hand, he knew Klaus had come back to himself. His voice sounded like his own again. And Haruki had noticed, like a bright spot in the centre of his vision where small details filtered through, that the hand that reached for him was shaking slightly.

But by then, enough seconds had passed that he couldn’t make up for his first response. To make up for the fact that he had been afraid and had curled away.

And he knew that was why Klaus, in the haze of unreality that had fallen in the shed, got up and left. He knew that was why the sound of the bike’s engine revved near the door and got dimmer.

‘Wait –’

But Klaus was gone.

None of it felt real. It had all happened much too quickly. Surely it hadn’t happened.

He tried to sit up and the pain made him gasp slightly. He blinked through tears and tried to assess how hurt he was. His left arm ached at his wrist and elbow. And though he felt as though something inside him was torn, he didn’t understand how bad it was until he stood up and felt something warm trickle between his legs.

Bathroom.

He walked slowly towards the en suite, holding out a hand to steady himself against the wall. Every step sent a small, insidious flare of pain, like a tiny splinter, through his body.

He had reached the bathroom by the time he heard footsteps.

And, to his surprise and dismay, his heart soared.

‘Klaus?’

It plummeted again when he turned to see Kolya standing in the doorway, his face registering real shock for the first time that Haruki had ever seen.

Haruki felt briefly winded.

‘Sir…’

‘I’m alright,’ Haruki said automatically.

Kolya took a step into the bathroom.

‘You’re bleeding.’

‘I just – I need a minute.’

‘Sir –’

‘Just give me a minute, okay? Please.’

And Kolya, against his better judgment, against the numb rage that was building slowly, stepped out of the bathroom and watched Haruki shut the door.

* * *

He had been waiting for Haruki on the edge of the officer’s courtyard when he watched Klaus tearing away on his bike at a speed that startled him. A speed that seemed reckless even for him.

And so he had followed his sense of foreboding towards the shed, where the door was partially ajar.

And now he waited, fists by his sides, for his master to open the bathroom door. His mind was still plastered with the image of Haruki, lit by the glaring fluorescent lights, holding onto the bathroom railing for support and a thin trickle of blood coming down his leg.

Kolya felt a surge of nausea for the first time in a long time.

And his rage silently intensified.

The door opened slowly and Haruki emerged, glancing at Kolya only once before avoiding his eye. Kolya grit his teeth when he observed how cautiously Haruki moved.

‘I’ll carry you.’

‘No,’ Haruki said at once, appalled by the thought that his men would see him like that.

They made their way gingerly to Haruki’s room through a dark, quiet evening. Kolya supported his weight when he could, when they were out of anyone’s view. Haruki refused when Kolya suggested that they go to see Suguri.

When they reached the bedroom, Haruki dismissed him.

In the shower, Haruki continued to hold back his tears. As he pulled on a fresh pair of jinbei, he thought of Ukiyo kneeling at his small table and folding pair after pair. And still he managed to keep the tears at bay.

He came out to see that Kolya was still there, standing beside the bed. He was too tired to tell him to leave. He sat on the edge of the bed and Kolya stayed standing.

‘Did he do this to you?’

Kolya knew he must have, but he had to ask anyway. He turned to see Haruki struggling to answer.

‘He didn’t – he didn’t mean to.’ Haruki stared at a place on the floor. ‘It wasn’t... him.’

And suddenly he was crying. And he was slumped and Kolya was sitting next to him, holding him up. By the time Haruki fell asleep, Kolya remained exactly where he was.


	59. Enemies

There were two peculiarities about Kolya Volkov, as he had been known before he fled Eurote.  
  
Of these two peculiarities, one was visible to others. He never got sick. He seemed to recover from physical wounds uncannily fast. In ways that were sometimes obvious and sometimes ineffable, he simply seemed to be far stronger than he ought to be. He would run faster and longer. He could throw further and kick harder. He would unthinkingly lift things or move things in order to help others without realising it ought to have taken several men to do the job. But after learning that people would either be afraid of him or make fun of him or take advantage of him, he had learned from an early age to keep that part of him as much of a secret as possible.  
  
The second peculiarity was something that no one else could see. It was a vision that had followed him since he was a child. As a child, he believed it to be a memory and had no trouble accepting it as such. When he was slightly older, he realised it didn't make sense for him to have a memory of a time when he was an adult.  
  
For in this dream, he was indeed an adult. He was tall and broad and he sat astride a horse. And standing on the ground looking up at him was someone. Someone important. Someone whose face went in and out of focus over the course of his life whenever he tried to think back on it – on this vision or dream or premonition or whatever it was.  
  
The only thing about it he knew for sure were the words. He had spoken a set of words when he leaned down to touch that face. He had said, simply, _I'll come back, Young Master._ _  
_  
'It is another gift from God,' his grandmother told him when he was six and he divulged the vision to someone for the first and last time. 'It is a sign that you will be a powerful warrior for God in his kingdom on Earth. He gave you that vision just like he gave you your strength. It means something.'  
  
His father had died in the war between the east and Eurote before Kolya was born and his mother had died giving birth to him, leaving him in the care of a grandmother whose two greatest loves were her God and her grandson. She had always known of his strength and knew it was a sign from above. But she didn’t understand his vision. She didn't know what to say when Kolya tried to explain that it seemed like a memory rather than an omen. So Kolya was left struggling to reconcile it with the God he knew and believed in.  
  
It wasn't until he learned of the gods of the east in school that he understood the notion of past lives. Endless lives, one after the other. And he wondered if he had picked up a fragment of something that had happened to him a long time ago.  
  
In the meantime, he trusted his instincts because they came through for him often. He trusted them enough to leave school at a young age and begin work in order to support his grandmother. It was heavy work at the mill and he was the youngest there but he would lift and push and heave more than any other man there and, for the first time, he and his grandmother weren't tight for money. He trusted his instincts again at age sixteen when the first war between east and west broke out. He had been at work when his supervisor announced the outbreak of war. His vision of that face, his master, came back to him. And he knew right then and there that he would forge his age and enlist the following day. His grandmother cried for a full night over the simple note he left her.  
  
His physical prowess and what appeared to be an immunity to bullets and blasts made him rise through the ranks in no time. By the end of the first war, he had been promoted to Major General.  
  
He waited through it all for the reason behind his drive to become clear. For the face in his dream to materialise. But it never did.  
  
After the fall of Mussolin, Kolya almost returned to his grandmother. But the rise of Rossi, he and the nation quickly realised, meant that Mussolin's order hadn't been undone. The military was called on again, this time to fight the uprising among its own people.  
  
Kolya was selected as part of a special squad. Rossi's secret police. They made people disappear in the dead of night.

For the rest of his life, Kolya would be ashamed of how long it took for him to realise what he was doing. And what he had done. He had silenced his inner voice, his instinct and intuition, and deferred completely to his life as a soldier. So waylaid was he in his drive to fulfil whatever role he was destined for – to find the master that his vision had spoken of – that he lost sight of what was immediately before him. The people who kneeled before his gun, petrified and shaking and pleading, before the unfeeling crack of his bullet put an end to their begging.

Then he received word that his grandmother had died. And it occurred to him just how long it had been since he saw her. How he had left home at age sixteen without saying goodbye because he had been afraid that she would try to stop him.

He began to see what was taking place around him under Rossi’s rule and in the long years since Mussolin had first taken control of Eurote. It occurred to him that perhaps those whose lives he was ending were the innocents and his superiors were the wrongdoers. And though he had no choice but to follow orders, for military command was supreme, it began to leave an impact each time someone died by his hand. He envied the men under his command who appeared to do it all so effortlessly.  
  
He was caught somewhere in the middle of that impossible rewiring when he saw Haruki Yamamoto for the first time. The young commander was with Minister Rossi in the cabinet war room at the time. Kolya had been taken by the easterner's quick smile and deep eyes and how the hem of his jade coat followed in the wake of his steps.  
  
Haruki remembered being introduced to Major General Kolya Volkov as an exemplary soldier who kept the Eurotean people safe. He was struck by the soldier's build and unsmiling gaze. But when his merits were announced proudly by Rossi, Haruki wondered if something like guilt had flickered across the soldier’s stony features.  
  
A few days later, on the day the commander was scheduled to return to the east, a riot broke out on the streets of the Eurotean capital. It was a riot of such proportions that the things Kolya and his squad were told to do in the dead of night were now being done in the light of day. Families were dragged from homes onto the streets and lined up based on nothing more than mere suspicion of being rebels. Gunshots cracked through the air.  
  
And for the first time in his life, Kolya refused to carry out his order. In that moment, it all fell away. The God he believed in and the people he fought for and the people he fought against and the bodies that lay dead in a long, long line behind him over the years. It caught up to him then and, for all his strength, he very nearly buckled.  
  
And suddenly, the men in his command, a small, lethal squad of only seven, also refused. Kolya had stared at them, the men who had inhabited the same darkness with him for so many years. It was a curious moment – a sombre one amidst the bedlam in the streets around them – and Kolya found he was on the verge of tears for the first time in his life when he realised he and his men had all decided, then and there, that their lives would be forsaken as one.  
  
Haruki and his convoy from the east had been passing through the intersection, so it was only by chance that Haruki saw any of it. He saw the shivering, huddled civilians lined up on the streets and he recognised the imposing figure of Major General Kolya Volkov being forced to his knees and handcuffed.  
  
By the time Haruki had ordered the convoy to turn, it was too late. They drove past a line of butchered civilians. The squad itself, held immediately accountable for insubordination, had been taken around the corner, pushed against the wall and shot.  
  
All eight lay on the ground, still wearing the uniforms that pledged them to Rossi.  
  
Just as that heavy, aimless grief and injustice threatened to take over Haruki, one of the men on the ground – the largest one – stirred. Haruki's chest flared with hope and he ordered his men to bring the soldier onto their truck.  
  
Kolya remembered going in and out of consciousness. Whenever he came to, there was the face of the young commander from the east whom he had met briefly a few days ago. He wondered if perhaps his was the face Kolya had seen his whole life. The one he had always been meant to find. He couldn't be sure, but he wondered. And that wonder gave him new life.  
  
The doctors at the hospital were dumbfounded. The next day, they reported to Haruki that the bullets had miraculously missed all of his vital organs and that both the bones and flesh wounds were healing well. Far too well. Haruki's relief that the soldier had survived was now supplanted by confusion about what the doctors had said and a gut-based instinct that Kolya might still be in danger. On an impulse that proved wise, Haruki had feigned ignorance of Kolya's name or rank or unit. They were still in Eurote, after all. There was no telling whom the doctors reported to. He delayed his return to the east by a few days.

By then, Kolya had awoken. Haruki stepped into the hospital room. Kolya’s torso was bare above the blankets; the doctors had neglected to give him a hospital robe out of sheer curiosity at the rate at which his body healed.

Haruki felt a little uneasy under Kolya’s gaze, which was intent and expressionless despite all he had suffered.

‘I don’t know if you remember me,’ he began in slightly accented Eurotean.

‘I do, sir.’

‘There’s no need for “sir”. You outrank me,’ Haruki reminded him.

Not anymore, Kolya thought but couldn’t bring himself to say. He had technically been executed for insubordination, which would strip him of rank. Strip him of everything he knew.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine.’

Haruki waited for a few moments.

‘You’re not in any pain?’ he prompted.

‘No, sir.’

‘But… you were shot. Multiple times.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The silence stretched on for a while.

'You don't talk much,' Haruki observed with a nervous smile.  
  
'I'm sorry.'  
  
'No, it’s… not a bad thing.'

Haruki drew a little closer, unsure exactly what he was doing.

‘I saw part of what happened,’ Haruki said, flicking a glance at the closed door to make sure he had remembered to lock it. ‘During the riots yesterday. But I didn’t see everything. And the doctors are telling me… impossible things. I’m trying to understand.’

Kolya stared at him for a few seconds that would decide his fate. He didn’t understand much of anything except for the fact that the young commander had gone out of his way to bring Kolya back to life. And so he told him what had happened during the riots.

And everything that had happened before that.

Everything, back to when he was a child and had, without even trying, crushed the bones of the hand of the teacher who had tried to hit him.

Everything, including his broiling, consuming guilt for having been unable to say goodbye to his grandmother.

He had never spoken so much in his whole life. The tears he couldn’t shed as he faced his own death not long ago finally found him there.  
  
And Haruki listened quietly, sitting in the narrow chair by the bed.  
  
Afterwards, there was a little confusion. Haruki's mind raced – along with everything else, with thoughts of how to get Kolya out of that hospital and out of the clutches of an army that wanted him dead. He was halfway through telling Kolya not to trust the doctors, and asking whether he knew somewhere safe he could hide from the military police, when Kolya interrupted.  
  
Kolya, whose mind was also racing, and who thought of the only words Haruki had said after he listened to Kolya's story, all of his darkness and his secret and his pain and the terrible things he had done.  
  
_You're... remarkable._  
  
They were only two words. But they were the only two words that the young commander from the east had chosen. And there was a light in his dark eyes, a sincerity and depth that Kolya had only ever seen when his grandmother looked at him.  
  
By then, Haruki had gotten up to glance out the window into the hallway, again paranoid that the army had cottoned on that Kolya had survived.  
  
'I want to come with you.'  
  
Haruki was taken aback. 'With me where?'  
  
'To the east. Please. I feel like... like I'm meant to follow you there.'  
  
Haruki tried to understand.

'Major General, it's not –'  
  
'Kolya.'  
  
Haruki hesitated. 'Kolya. It's not that easy. I've just been made commander of an armoured division in my country. It's the same world as this, the same –'  
  
'I don't care,' Kolya said, getting to his feet and drawing near. 'I want to come with you. I –' Kolya had always struggled with words and never more so than now, when it meant so much. 'I owe you my life.'

'Not according to what the doctors said. You – your body is –'  
  
'I don't mean… like that,' Kolya said, his deep voice faltering a little out of frustration at himself. He stared at the ground and he clenched his fists tightly, nails digging into his palms. 'Please, sir.'  
  
Haruki still didn't understand. He had said and done barely anything at all since he stepped into the hospital room. And so he flushed at the sight of Kolya who stood before him – whole and intact on the surface but on the breaking point somewhere inside – giving himself over to Haruki so suddenly.  
  
It made him think of the day he had seen Klaus kneeling by Taki's feet in the open air beside the tank, Taki's hand in his. And Haruki, still months too early to understand, had wondered what a bond like that truly meant.  
  
And though he couldn't be sure what was happening exactly, Haruki knew he couldn't deny Kolya. Not when his future in his own country was so dire. Not when he had bared himself so fully.  
  
'Okay,' he said.  
  
Kolya looked up. 'Sir?'  
  
'If you're sure it's what you want...'  
  
'I'm sure.'  
  
Haruki's expression changed. Kolya saw an intentness there he hadn't seen before.  
  
'Then we leave tonight. Are you well enough for that?'  
  
Kolya almost hung his head with the weight of his gratitude.  
  
'Yes, sir.'  
  
It would be another six months before Kolya, a mere private at the Fifteenth Armoured Division, was promoted to first class and made the commander's bodyguard. But there was something already forged there in that hospital room in Eurote that spoke of Kolya's unwavering dedication for the next two years.  
  
Then Haruki glanced down the length of his body and blushed again.  
  
'Maybe you should... put some clothes on.'  
  
'Oh,' said Kolya, looking down and noticing his nakedness for the first time.  
  
And so Major General Kolya Volkov left for the east as Private Kolya di Lupo, following his instincts and the vision he had seen his whole life; the image of a face which he thought – he hoped – might be Haruki's.

* * *

Since that day, Kolya always made sure to trust his intuition. He let that inner voice, something resembling instinct but with a surer omniscience, guide his every action. He had intuitively asked to join the convoy on the patrol where Haruki’s jeep, several vehicles ahead, was caught in the grenade blast that had given Haruki his burns. He had followed his instincts in Hokane when he and the commander were separated and found him again only a few blocks later. And he had trusted his instincts about Klaus. He had known Klaus would hurt the commander in some way.

And yet, regardless of his intuition, he had failed. He hadn’t been there to stop it from happening. Whether it was the grenade explosion or Hokane or Klaus. Kolya was always there after the fact.

He felt that same sense of impotence and failure the next morning when he watched Haruki wake up.

It felt to Haruki like gauze had been pulled over his eyes and brow. He blinked heavily and sat up. His eyes landed on Kolya who sat near the footboard, watching him.

Guilt and shame came together in the pit of his stomach when he realised Kolya had been there all night.

‘Did – did you get any sleep?’ he asked hesitantly.

Kolya nodded. He had slept in small snatches.

‘Thank you for… staying,’ Haruki said as he pushed back the covers. ‘But I’m okay.’

He slowly got to his feet, relieved to find the pain had receded a great deal overnight. He walked to his wardrobe and pulled out his uniform, aware that Kolya had moved to the edge of the bed but stayed where he was.

Kolya was trying to make sense of it. Of Haruki’s answer the previous night. Why it sounded like he had already forgiven Klaus. Even though his knowledge and experience of such things were very limited, he had an inkling of what it all meant.

‘Do you love him?’

Haruki felt winded again, like he did yesterday when Kolya turned up in Klaus’ shed. He gripped the uniform and glanced down at the shining silver insignia on the shoulders.

‘Yes.’

His tone was quiet. Apologetic and sincere. Kolya felt it hit him somewhere.

But it only took a moment for his resolve to harden.

‘I’m sorry, sir. But I can’t let him live after this.’

Haruki spun around.

‘No,’ he said, his voice breaking slightly again, knowing it was a real threat, and that Kolya was more than capable of carrying it out. ‘No, you’re not to touch him. Okay? Kolya, that’s – that’s an order.’

Kolya didn’t say anything.

Haruki stood before him for a few helpless seconds, realising his order might not even be necessary. He didn’t know where Klaus had gone. Or if he would come back.

And then he wondered about the way Kolya looked at him. Though he was almost sure he was imagining it, it almost felt as though Kolya was disappointed in him. As though Kolya had believed that Haruki was stronger than this.

But the longer he stared, the more it became clear that Kolya’s eyes held no such judgment. That feeling came from Haruki alone.

I thought I was stronger than this, Haruki realised.

But on another level, he had known this. That Klaus had the power to do this to him. He was the one who gave Haruki the strength that everyone else saw. So it made sense that he would be the one to take it all away.

‘It’s always been him,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if… if that makes any sense. But it’s always been Klaus.’

Kolya tried to understand.

‘Please don’t hurt him, okay?’

Kolya began to realise that even stronger than his anger at Klaus was his anger at himself for not being there to protect his master like he was supposed to. And Haruki’s quiet appeal had made him realise there was more to it than he could see.

So he tried to rein in his instincts, just that once.  
  
When Haruki entered the general meeting room where Hasebe and his other officers had gathered, he tried not to look at Klaus’ empty seat.

‘Sir,’ Hasebe said, handing him a newspaper. ‘You should see this.’

* * *

_MEANWHILE, IN A MILITARY PRISON IN THE CAPITAL_

Nakamori glanced up at the sound of footsteps and went straight to the bars of his cell. He was relieved to see Tachibana walking up the echoing corridor, flanked by two guards.

‘Thank the gods,’ Nakamori exclaimed. ‘No one here listened to a word I said.’

‘We have a problem,’ Tachibana said.

Nakamori’s expression froze in place.

‘What?’

‘Do you recall there being a reporter during your attempted arrest of Yamamoto?’

‘A reporter? No, there was just –’

He suddenly remembered the thin man who had left the office.

‘That was –’

‘Izumi Shunsuke, media liaison to the Fifteenth Armoured Division and senior political correspondent at the _Sankei Shimbun_ ,’ Tachibana said, his voice echoing off the walls. ‘He has just published a nation-wide article about the fact that headquarters is now charging its commanders with treason, rather than insubordination, for failing to follow orders in battle, and that the penalty now carries summary execution without due process.’

A thorny silence followed the damning truth of the report.

‘He – you –’ Nakamori stammered, falling back on his usual indignant splutter. ‘You have to get rid of him! That beady-eyed little –’

‘What to do about Shunsuke and his editor remains to be seen,’ Tachibana said. ‘Your position, on the other hand, has been made clear.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘With this bit of exposure, I’ve been put in an uncomfortable position, Nakamori. People are asking questions again, about legality and weapons and tactics and all sorts of things I simply don’t have the time for, with us so close to winning in the west, and –!’

Tachibana caught himself before he lost his composure. He turned a cold eye on his general.

‘I didn’t think it would be such a challenge for you to successfully apprehend one commander.’

‘Yamamoto’s men turned on me,’ Nakamori said, pronouncing each word with emphasis. ‘Not just his goddamn dogs, his colonels as well! You’re facing a full-fledged mutiny from the Fifteenth.’

‘No such thing has been declared.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Tachibana.’

‘Careful,’ the emperor said, even more icily. After a tense pause he continued, ‘Of course I know about Yamamoto’s defiance. He’s even arrested Aizawa and sent him here for colluding with you. But Yamamoto’s been careful to impugn you and your office and not mine.’

Nakamori slowly began to understand. He realised that at no point had either of the guards that accompanied Tachibana made a move to release him from his cell.

‘For now,’ Tachibana went on, ‘so long as you’re out of the way, neither he nor the papers are speaking of mutiny or coups. I’d like to keep it that way.’

‘You can’t possibly let Yamamoto get away with –’

‘I can’t afford to lose any support from other divisions. The commanders are already doubting our orders. This is the way it has to be for now.’

 _You’re throwing me under the bus, in other words,_ Nakamori thought with a disbelieving curve of the lips. After twelve years of working together…

It was a thought that Chancellor Adar Mussolin had also had, also about Tachibana, not long before his fall from power.

‘When the dust has settled, I’ll get rid of Yamamoto,’ Tachibana said, turning to leave. ‘In the meantime, you and I both have to sit quietly.’

‘You can’t leave me in here,’ Nakamori said, his tone one of stoic disbelief.

Tachibana’s exit without a backwards glance proved otherwise.

* * *

_MEANWHILE, AT THE REIZEN RESIDENCE_

Klaus awoke and thought he was still dreaming. For a blissful moment he even thought he was dead. But when it occurred to him that wherever he was going after death probably wouldn't entail warm morning light or that smell of light sandalwood and lavender, he realised he was most likely still alive.  
  
Nevertheless, the next hour still came to him like a dream. Midori's concerned face. The conversation they had. Memories from the previous day; riding his bike through largely deserted roads at night, which possibly accounted for why he hadn't crashed into another vehicle, all the way to the Reizen residence, where he had gotten off the bike, let it topple onto the gravel driveway and then fell himself.  
  
'We couldn't wake you no matter how hard we tried!' Midori said. 'Rudi and Ogura ended up dragging you back here.'  
  
Here, in his old room in Taki's childhood home. Where he had lived for only a few months after the war, before Taki had made his broken proposal beneath the wisteria. He had fled here, to a place that had been spared. A place that had never known the wolf. He had come to his master’s home to seek relief and forgiveness and to just forget. Forget.

Forget.

But it came crashing down on him as soon as he opened his eyes.

He couldn’t look at Midori. He couldn’t stand seeing that beauty and that kindness and openness while he remembered holding Haruki down, ignoring his pleas, forcing himself into his body, the strained, tear-streaked face, the way he had looked at him afterwards.

The way Haruki had looked at him –

The way Taki had collapsed and not woken up –

Midori was startled and concerned when Klaus let out a small but gut-wrenching groan and curled into himself.

‘Do you want some water?’ she tried timidly.

When Klaus didn’t respond, she reached out and touched his shoulder.

‘Don’t!’ he snapped, loud enough to make her jump and pull her hand back.

There was a small pause.

‘Klaus-chan…’ Midori said, sounding both surprised and hurt.

Something in her voice – and in the diminutive form she had used with his name since she was six years old – pulled a small thread in Klaus’ mind. He opened his eyes and uncurled enough to lie on his side. He looked at her through half-lidded eyes.

‘Sorry.’

She seemed immediately placated. Her bright smile forgave him in a heartbeat. She turned to pour him some water on the nightstand.

Klaus knew that he had subconsciously been aiming to end up beneath the tree the previous night. But as the hours wore on, he could barely make it out of bed, let alone out of the room. Though the effects and aftereffects of the drugs were wearing off, something far less physical was keeping him tied down.

If not for his earlier outburst at Midori, he would have refused to let her or anyone else come near him. But she remained by his side and he remained still as they brought him water and food, none of which he touched. He heard Rudi’s voice a few times, and Ogura’s. But he ignored them all.

The drugs had been strong enough that the memory only came to him in flashes, but each of those flashes carried the full weight of what he had done. The awful things he had said.

Sometimes, the trace amounts still coasting in his veins came as a blessing; they would rush to his head and he would sink into sleep again.

On one occasion, when he rose back into consciousness, he found himself thinking vaguely and abstractly about enemies, as though his sleeping mind had been pondering it.

It was something that had occurred to him since he first took on the assignment passed down to him from Hartmann. The assignment that would see him put a bell on the prince from the east, get to know him, perhaps be his friend for life. A way to get closer to the enemy and understand their workings, foresee their movements.  
  
Ever since the assignment that he had bemoaned, lightly, to Claudia as something he simply wasn’t looking forward to, he realised how complex and nuanced a concept it was; this concept of enemies.

When Klaus had been younger, dreaming of joining the war to fight for his country, the distinction between friend and foe had been clear. But it changed time and time again over the course of life. The enemy was, at first, the east. Then, almost overnight after he followed a prince back to his nation, it was the west. Then it was Hans and Mussolin.

Only a few days ago, it was the west again, and those who wore armbands and tried to bring down Tachibana. Now it was Tachibana himself.

Alongside all of that, he also remembered his enemies in a different way. His first real enemy was moving past everything he had lost in the first war. Then came the war he and Taki had fought between themselves for so long before Hans had split them apart even further and then brought them together. After that came the battle against Taki’s silence and all of Taki’s nameless barriers; some of which fell over time and others which never did.

Then it was the war against Taki’s illness. He thought it was the worst one of all. The enemy that came after proved yet worse; death, which crept in while Klaus had been asleep and whisked Taki away from him without even the faintest stirring of the curtain.

And then he faced his most daunting foe to date. One that the child who sat in the wheat field and dreamed of flying over the mountains could never have predicted.

It was the prospect of living out the rest of his days without his master.

That was a foe that kept coming back to strike at him in new ways and with a new arsenal of weapons each time. And he kept losing.

And Haruki had borne the brunt of it all.

Haruki, who had done nothing but try to salvage and soothe and heal.

_I deserve to die._

‘Klaus-chan!’ Midori said reproachfully. ‘No, you don’t!’

He opened his eyes blearily again, unaware that he had muttered aloud. He tried to use the light in the room to gauge how much time had passed.

And then he looked at Midori, her dark eyes and pale face framed by obsidian hair. He observed her look of dismay.

‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.

Klaus stared at her for a long time.

‘I did something unforgivable.’

Midori looked at him sympathetically. ‘You mean last night, before you came here?’

‘Yes,’ Klaus said softly. He looked away. ‘And before then, too. A long time ago.’ One was a memory he remembered all too well. The other, according to Suguri, he didn't remember at all.

Midori thought about it.

‘How did you make up for it last time?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You didn’t do anything to try to be forgiven? Last time?’

Klaus was silent for some time. The mission in No Man’s Land. The bullets that had nearly killed him. Taki bringing him back to life on a riverbank.

‘I… tried to prove myself,’ Klaus said dully, rubbing his forehead as he sat upright.

‘Well, why don’t you try it again this time?’ Midori offered, wondering if her shots in the dark were helping him at all.

Her words made Klaus think over everything that had happened over the past few days. Nakamori and Shoda and the revolution and Meiji. It felt like it had happened years ago. He felt like he was no longer a part of it.

Above all, he couldn’t look at Haruki again.

‘I think I'll leave,’ he said, before he realised he had even decided to do so. ‘I’ve done enough harm here.’

Midori watched him helplessly.

‘Where will you go?’

‘Back to the cottage.’

As Klaus spoke, he remembered Claudia and the family had moved back there as a precaution when war broke out. He imagined the house being filled with her laughter and Heinrich’s animated stories about being a cadet. He realised the cottage wouldn’t give him the silence and solitude he wanted to lose himself in again.

‘So you’re not even going to try?’ Midori said.

Perhaps, if there was a chance they could win against Tachibana, if there was a chance that things could be set right, both with Haruki and with the balance of power in the world, the Strausses could go back home and Klaus could finally close himself off from the world in peace.

He looked at Midori and she was pleased to see the smallest flicker of life in his eyes again.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I should at least try.’

‘Exactly!’ she said happily.

‘I’ll try to make it right.’ He would never touch Haruki again. He would do what he could to win the war for him. ‘And then I’ll leave.’

Her smiled wavered.

‘So you’ll still go back home afterwards?’

‘Yes.’

Her shoulders fell in slightly. She had always hated the thought of Klaus being up at the cottage by himself. But she didn’t know what else she had expected. Perhaps a small part of her had hoped that, after her brother's death, Klaus might one day come back to the Reizen residence for good.

And so she said exactly that, in words that were light and casual. And she was happy to see him smile at the thought.

‘Be a full-time nanny for Soseki?’ he mused ironically. ‘Yeah, why not?’

‘Hebe can teach you the koto,’ Midori said, leaning back on both hands, extending the little fantasy. ‘And you can help Rudi with his kanji. And you can help Douman with the revolution.’

Klaus looked at her sharply.

‘Oh, Rudi told me,’ Midori explained. ‘I know he’s not supposed to, but he says he won’t keep secrets from me. He told me a long time ago. He also told me that you and Haruki-san know now too.’

Hearing Haruki’s name sent the same unpleasant jolt through him that he had come to associate with hearing Taki’s.

‘It worries me,’ Midori went on. ‘That you’re all doing something so dangerous. But it gives me hope too, you know? If anyone can do something like this, make a real change that affects the world, it’s you. People like you, I mean. You and Haruki-san and Douman and Rudi.’

Klaus watched her again for a few moments.

‘You grew up fast,’ he observed.

Midori beamed. ‘Thank you.’

‘I wish Taki could have seen you.’

Again, her smile dimmed slightly, but she still retained that twinkle in her eye despite the sorrow. Klaus wondered how she did it.

‘You miss him a lot, don’t you, Klaus-chan?’ she observed gently.

There was a small lump in his throat. He reached over to the nightstand for the first time, picked up the glass of water and drained it. He leaned forwards a little more and ran a hand through his hair.

‘I wish I could talk to him,’ he said quietly. Then he thought about all the times over the past two years that he had done that. ‘I mean _really_ talk to him. I wish I could hear him tell me what to do.’

Midori thought about it seriously.

‘If it was me,’ she said. ‘And Rudi wanted to know what I’d say, I’d tell him to do whatever made him happy.’

Klaus smiled at her naivety.

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Sometimes it is, though, right? Sometimes I feel like things that seem complicated on the surface are actually really…’ Midori trailed off and sighed at herself. ‘I don’t know.’

Klaus pictured himself returning to the west after this final mission was over. He would spend the train ride forgetting deep, soulful brown eyes and sun-drenched bedrooms and laughter that switched on distant, tinkling lights. He would sit by himself in the rose garden and watch the wind rustle the hedges and the years would pass by him silently.

‘Sometimes,’ Klaus said. ‘There are enemies that you need to fight alone.’

Midori mulled his words over and wondered what they meant. And she couldn’t help but feel like he was wrong, at least on that count. But she didn’t feel like she had the wisdom or experience to say so.

* * *

Haruki had to keep pushing on.

For all of its complexity, it boiled down to a simple choice. His choice.

And he would let Shoda know he had chosen the people.

Izumi’s article gave him new strength in what he was doing. He immediately dispatched a few soldiers he trusted to protect Izumi and his family in case the capital went after him.

And then he did everything in his power to forget the previous night and throw his weight into the revolution.

Rescuing Meiji was the first step.  
  
He and Hasebe spent hours and hours in his office. All known maps and photographs and information on Tachibana's province were salvaged and pored over. Though they trusted the colonels and officers of the division, for the time being their safety was in secrecy and so they hadn’t divulged their change in allegiance to anyone else. Not until they had a plan that would work.

With just himself and Hasebe trying to execute the search-and-rescue of the rightful emperor of the east, they struggled a great deal.  
  
And yet, despite going nowhere, despite the futility of every option they tried, Haruki revelled in the feeling that he was finally fighting for the right side.  
  
Tachibana's residence continued to pose a problem. It would take them over six hours to get there. All military vehicles would be subject to checkpoints on the highways. And even once there, infiltration would be virtually impossible. It was every bit as tightly guarded as the Reizen winter residence they were in now. There was almost no way in.

Except one.  
  
An hour later, Ryoumei sat before Haruki, slightly nervous about the tension that filled the office.

Haruki glanced at Hasebe before taking a breath.

'We have been contacted by Shoda, leader of the _Hitobito no Shori,_ and are about to engage in high treason and mutiny against the reigning emperor and we were hoping for your help.'*  
  
Ryoumei stared for a beat. Then he slumped backwards in his seat and let out a loud huff at the ceiling.  
  
'Thank fuck.'  
  
With Ryoumei on board, they now had an outline of a plan that was incredibly risky but far more plausible than a ground-based approach. Ryoumei would log the flight plan as a routine patrol over several provinces that would take them over the Tachibana winter residence.  
  
'And who's the idiot who's willing to jump out of a moving plane into enemy territory?' Ryoumei said.  
  
'Me,' said Kolya.  
  
Ryoumei jumped at the unfamiliar sound of his voice and wondered if he had ever heard him speak. Then he frowned, first at Kolya then at Haruki.   
  
'Is he serious?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
'What? But... he's just a private!'  
  
Haruki and Kolya exchanged a glance. They had already discussed it as they waited for Ryoumei to arrive at the compound. Haruki hadn't even finished asking the question before Kolya readily agreed.  
  
'He's actually a major general with advanced special ops training,' Haruki said finally. ‘Several of his missions required the skills of a paratrooper. In fact, he's probably the most qualified soldier in this or any other base to carry out this mission.'  
  
Ryoumei stared at the Eurotean with newfound awe. 'No shit.'  
  
Haruki outlined the rest of the search-and-rescue. Once Meiji was secured and removed from the residence, they were to make it on foot for around two hours to the small uninhabited land-bridge stretching across the peninsula where Ryoumei would be waiting to fly them home.  
  
'What could go wrong?' Ryoumei said dryly.  
  
Hasebe bristled. Ryoumei's attitude and manner had irritated him from the moment he stepped into the commander's office.  
  
'Do you have a better idea?'  
  
'Nope. I'm just complaining.'  
  
Haruki bit back a smile.  
  
'When does this need to happen?'  
  
'As soon as possible. I don't know how much longer Tachibana will wait before he takes action against me or the division.' He glanced down at the spread of their plans and back up at Ryoumei. 'Tonight, if you can.'  
  
'I'd need a co-pilot,' Ryoumei said, thinking of the planes available that day. 'I can think of a few pilots at the base who might be on board with all this hefty treason. But it’s risky.'

‘I could do it,’ Haruki said.

‘Tachibana will jump at any chance to arrest you, sir,’ Hasebe said. ‘Let alone if you’re caught in a stunt like this.’

'If no one else can fly,' said a voice at the door.  
  
Haruki's heart leaped straight to his throat. All heads turned.  
  
‘Then use me.'[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-7.html/19/)

* * *

Haruki's chest ached just looking at him. His shabby military jacket, stained from what looked like a skid mark, his face drawn and his eyes wan and dull. His words had been uttered, though Haruki didn’t know, with a dry nostalgia. But it wasn't accompanied by even a hint of his usual smile.  
  
Kolya walked to the door automatically, moved by a rage that pulsed in his ears and drowned out everything else. He didn't hear Haruki calling him to stop.  
  
Even as Kolya approached, Klaus' gaze was fixed on Haruki; the eyes that were open in surprise and uncertainty and relief, the long line of his body when he stood up.

In fact, he only focused on Kolya in the few seconds before Kolya's fist flew into his face with a force he didn't at all expect. He fell back against the wall and heard various exclamations from the others in the office, promptly drowned out by Kolya slamming his fist into the same place on his jaw. A knee was thrown into his gut with enough strength to leave him gasping. He fell to the office floor where the ensuing kick to his ribs felt like it splintered something.  
  
And he didn't so much as lift a finger to stop him.  
  
But he also began to realise, through the blossoming pain, that he couldn't have stopped Kolya even if he tried.  
  
Haruki reached Kolya and tried in vain to pull him away. By then, Kolya had gripped Klaus' collar, yanked him a few inches off the floor and delivered more blows to the same place on his jaw. Then he was dropped to the floor again where Kolya’s boot flew straight into his side like a missile. Klaus couldn't believe the pain. He expected at any point for his ribs to be smashed in and for the next blow to kill him. He closed his eyes.

And Kolya, for his part, discovered again that he was angrier at himself than Klaus. The blows were directed at his own impotence.

‘Kolya, stop! Stop it, right now!’  
  
Ryoumei and Hasebe had watched on in confusion for a few seconds before rushing in to help.

Kolya was finally pulled back, breathing heavily, and he wiped the back of his mouth with his fist. Klaus curled up on the ground, emitting small grunts. Haruki stared down at him, afraid to let go of Kolya.  
  
And then everyone in the office heard a low, throaty chuckle.  
  
Not enough, Klaus thought. _  
_  
Something welled in his mouth and he spat out a small amount of blood. He then mustered just enough strength to lift his chin and glare at Kolya.  
  
'Is that it?’ he panted. ‘That was fucking pathetic.'

His self-restraint snapping once more, Kolya easily pulled out of Haruki's grasp. His fists flew again and landed with wet thuds.  
  
It was a strange moment for Hasebe, who was reminded of the day he had lashed at Klaus in a holding cell. He recognised that Klaus was goading Kolya in the same way he himself had been goaded.  
  
_Mad bastard,_ he decided, unable to understand why Klaus might have done that, in either case.

Their combined effort finally pulled Kolya away a second time. This time, Haruki stepped between them and knelt on the floor by Klaus’ head. And Hasebe was reminded, again, of that day in the holding cell.  
  
'Klaus...' Haruki said, his eyes welling. He gingerly touched the side of Klaus' face. He was bleeding heavily from his mouth and nose.  
  
Two of the soldiers on guard in the hallway had rushed to the door.  
  
'Get Suguri,' Haruki ordered.  
  
'No,' Klaus said in a tight groan as he lifted up on elbow.  
  
Haruki recalled Klaus having said something about Suguri the previous night.  
  
'Then get a nurse,' Haruki said.  
  
Klaus weakly tried to refuse but the soldier had already left. And there, from behind the searing pain in his head and face and body, was Haruki staring at him with tears in his eyes.  
  
And suddenly Klaus wanted to fall at his feet and beg for the forgiveness he didn't deserve. Not from Haruki nor Taki nor anyone else that had ever suffered because of him. But he wanted to hear Haruki forgive him and do something as simple as run his hands through Klaus' hair, feeling out the pain like his fingers had done once in the wake of a shell blast.  
  
Instead he lifted himself, grit his teeth and sat upright against the door frame.  
  
Ryoumei and Hasebe stood nearby uncertainly, keeping their eyes on Kolya who looked as though he was still seething, his knuckles splotched with Klaus' blood.  
  
Haruki turned to look at Kolya with an expression that came very close to making Kolya regret what he had done.  
  
'You're dismissed, Private.'  
  
Kolya faltered. 'Sir?'  
  
'You're _dismissed,'_ Haruki repeated a little louder, the coldness of his tone slicing through Kolya. 'Go and prepare for the mission. Now.'  
  
There was a short pause. Without another word, Kolya left the office.  
  
Ryoumei breathed a little easier. 'What in holy fuck was that?'  
  
And then he looked down and his heart gave a loud thud at the way Haruki still knelt by Klaus, trying to use his sleeve to stem the blood leaking copiously from Klaus' split lip.  
  
Klaus pulled away from his touch. He felt his ribs to confirm that none of them were broken. Nothing broken, but everything singing in pain.  
  
'I can still fly,' he said with a small grunt. 'If you still need that pilot.'  
  
'Don't be ridiculous.'  
  
'I'm dead serious.'  
  
'Klaus, you can’t possibly –’  
  
Ryoumei hesitated before he interjected. 'We do need another pilot.’ When Haruki looked at him in disbelief, Ryoumei was quick to add, ‘I mean, if he can actually stand up at any point in the next few hours.'  
  
'I can stand. And I can fly,' Klaus insisted. ‘Especially if it means we get –' He winced suddenly when pain spiked in his side. Each breath felt like his diaphragm was rising up to kiss multiple wounds before deflating again. 'If it means we get Meiji back.'  
  
A nurse arrived with a small first-aid kit. Haruki stepped away to give her room.

‘Brief me on the mission.’  
  
'You’re not going on the mission,' Haruki said, trying to sound authoritative but aware that it sounded like an appeal. 'Klaus, you're barely –'  
  
'Please,' Klaus said, softly and suddenly.  
  
Hasebe thought he must have misheard. He had never before heard the word come from Wolfstadt's mouth.  
  
Haruki, meanwhile, realised how similar he sounded to Kolya on the day he had asked to come with him to the east. His heart broke again as he watched Klaus sitting slumped against the door frame, wincing each time the nurse applied an antiseptic-dabbed cotton ball to his face.

He knew then that he had been right. It hadn't been Klaus last night, in his shed. It had been something else – something that had been awoken from below and taken control. It had been Klaus' hands and Klaus' grip and Klaus' words, but it hadn't been Klaus.  
  
Klaus was before him then, golden eyes once again wan and dull and beseeching, asking for Haruki's permission.  
  
Asking, Haruki realised, for repentance. Even though Haruki had already forgiven.  
  
Ryoumei stared in confusion between them and wondered what he was looking at.

* * *

Haruki stopped by Kolya’s room on his way to the western gate. Ryoumei waited there in the jeep he had brought, which would now be driven by one of Haruki’s sergeants.

Kolya’s was a small room on the same floor as Haruki’s. He knocked and entered and Kolya glanced up from the bed where he was lacing up new boots. Haruki noticed that he had washed Klaus’ blood from his hands.

‘A lieutenant is waiting for you in the prep room,’ he said, his tone still cold. ‘You’ll be given camouflage and special ops gear.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Haruki was about to leave before he hesitated.

‘Klaus is going on the mission.’

Kolya looked up.

‘And he’ll be in charge. Do what he says.’

Kolya stood up. ‘Sir, I –’

Haruki turned to leave. ‘That will be all.’

‘Wait –’

‘The decision is final. If you do anything to jeopardise the mission –’

‘Sir, it’s not that,’ Kolya said.

Haruki turned back, his expression unyielding. Kolya felt another wave of regret.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally. His words almost brought about a flicker of that familiar warmth in Haruki’s eyes. Kolya almost stopped there, relieved to see it, before he squared his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, but he deserved it.’

There was a pause before Kolya added, ‘And I would do it again. Sir.’

The impasse between them lasted a few tense seconds.

‘Kolya, I won’t let… You can’t –’

Kolya realised his words had let him down once more.

‘I didn’t mean... that I _will_ do it again. I just meant –’

‘I know what you meant,’ Haruki said quietly. He remembered Kolya holding him as he cried the night before. ‘I know why you –’

And the memory of what Klaus had done, still fresh and real, came back to him. He shook himself, realising he was in danger of slipping back into that world where nothing made sense.

Instead, he sighed, took Kolya’s arm and gripped it, thinking of all they had been through in the past two years.

Kolya looked at the face he hoped he had seen in his vision.

‘Will you be alright out there?’ Haruki asked. ‘It’s been a while since you did anything like this.’

‘I’ll be okay, sir,’ Kolya said, in the same voice and the same tone he had always used since Haruki first met him. A monotone of complete truth. Haruki believed him.

* * *

Ryoumei stared evenly at Haruki from beneath eyebrows that were locked in their permanent frown.

'Those two are the _only_ ones on my team?’ he said, his tone stolid. ‘Are you insane? The hell am I supposed to do if they start beating the shit out of each other in the middle of the flight?'  
  
'They... they won't.'  
  
'If the future of the revolution is riding on the three of us, we are all merrily fucked. You're aware of that, right?'  
  
After a short silence, Haruki heard himself laugh weakly. And then, out of nowhere, he felt tears spring to his eyes again and he only barely held them back, angry at himself for how many times it had happened in the past day.  
  
For a few seconds, Ryoumei was too busy reflecting on the various irregularities of his upcoming mission to notice. He sighed and glanced at Haruki, then did a mild double-take at how despondent he suddenly looked.

They stood near the west exit where Haruki had just spoken furtively with the guard on duty to the effect of not logging Ryoumei’s entry or impending exit, nor the men he would be leaving with. They stood nearby waiting for Klaus and Kolya. The sergeant waited by the jeep that was parked nearby in the square.

Ryoumei looked at Haruki again and pursed his lips.

'You going to tell me what the fight was about?'  
  
Haruki stared straight ahead. For a long time he didn't speak. And when he opened his mouth and hesitated Ryoumei could tell that he was hurting.  
  
'Okay, forget I asked.'

He noted that Haruki looked grateful. He sighed.

'I'll just swing by the pet store for a couple of muzzles before we take off.'  
  
'I heard that.'  
  
They glanced round to see Klaus making his way over in a fresh set of clothes and with his face clear of blood, though the cuts and bruises were still patent.  
  
'I wasn't trying to be quiet,' Ryoumei quipped.  
  
When Klaus drew up to them, Ryoumei again noticed something strange between them. They way Haruki looked at him and the way Klaus avoided his gaze.  
  
'I'd better go and make some room in the jeep,' he muttered before taking a few steps away.

He then thought of something and turned back. Haruki saw that his face was slightly different. More serious than his features were accustomed to.

‘Haruki…’ His voice sounded a little strained. ‘If they catch on to what we’re doing... You know how Tachibana works. Keiko and Sakura…’

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Haruki said gently. ‘I’ll have someone take them to your mother-in-law’s. Is she still in Ine?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll make sure they’re safe.’

Ryoumei gave a tense, grateful nod before he turned and walked towards the jeep.

Leaving Haruki alone with Klaus.

Haruki’s eyes roamed over the huge, purple bruise on his jaw and the cuts near his nose and mouth. And he didn’t know what to make of the fact that Klaus’ simmering golden gaze never met his. He only knew that it brought about a kind of hurt that almost had nothing to do with what had happened.

‘Are you… did the nurse patch you up okay? I didn’t get a chance to –’ he faltered and started again, discouraged when Klaus showed no sign of wanting to reply. ‘I’m sorry for what – for what Kolya did. I tried to –’

‘Kid,’ Klaus said finally, and Haruki felt a twinge at the weight he carried in his voice. ‘If you apologise to _me_ one more time… or ask me if _I’m_ okay…’

He paused on an intake of breath and Haruki, waited, hearing his heart pound.

'I deserve all of it and more,' Klaus said, in a tone so low that Haruki barely heard him. 'I don't deserve to be standing.'  
  
Haruki felt slightly breathless again. He suddenly remembered the pain in his arm and the tearing pain in his body as Klaus held him down.  
  
'No, Klaus –' he said, not knowing what else to say and only wanting to fix it all, to repair it so Klaus would look at him again the way he used to. Flailing for words, he reached out to touch his arm. 'Klaus, you don't –'  
  
Like he had done when he was slumped against the door frame, Klaus moved away from his touch. It was a subtle recoil but one that Haruki felt deeply.  
  
After another few painful seconds, Klaus let out a breath and tried to think about the upcoming mission. He thought about Meiji and how important it was that they shouldn't fail.

‘No radio comms from the compound,’ he recalled from the briefing. ‘No comms at all.’

‘No,’ Haruki confirmed.

Radio silence the whole way. Haruki wouldn’t know if the mission failed or succeeded, if his men survived or not, until the jeep driven by his sergeant returned to the compound.

‘Is Kolya okay with me being in charge?’ Klaus asked.

‘Yes.’ Haruki was grateful that he sounded confident when he answered.

And then Klaus hesitated, his focus drawn away again. ‘That guy…’

Haruki looked at him nervously.

‘Haruki, he –’ Klaus began, a frown crossing his face. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. I felt like he was only a few blows away from killing me with his bare hands.’ He paused and tried to cast his mind back. ‘Plus the way he reacted when he was shot, and the way he dragged me out of Hokane… and I still think he threw the match the day we sparred…’

Though he didn’t look at Haruki directly, Klaus again could tell he had hit on something based entirely on Haruki’s hesitation. The hesitation Klaus had seen since he had first asked about Kolya months ago.

‘If I’m going to be out there with him, I need to know what I’m dealing with.’

‘He’s not dangerous,’ Haruki said finally.

‘What is he?’

‘He’s just… strong.’

A simple few words that managed, despite everything, to spark irritation and jealousy. ‘I figured that much.’

‘No, I mean he’s…’ And Haruki hesitated for only a moment longer before he finally let Kolya’s secret go. He let out a breath and wondered where to start. ‘I told you about how he was sentenced to military execution and how I stepped in before they went through with it. That’s not exactly true. I got there after it had been carried out.’

Despite the fact that Klaus didn't yet understand, he was already hearing echoes of the day that Taki had told him about Hans.

‘They shot Kolya’s entire squad,’ Haruki went on. ‘And Kolya was the only one left alive. He spent a while in hospital and...’

And in the next few minutes Haruki explained it as best as he could, realising he wouldn’t come anywhere near the raw and poignant way that Kolya himself had spoken about it in that hospital room in Eurote.

‘And during the attack on the convoy last winter, when I was stuck in the jeep, he was the only one who was able to pull the door open. No one else –’ Haruki struggled to explain. ‘The blast had practically crushed and welded it shut but he somehow…’

Klaus soberly tried to process everything. Gratitude for Kolya, based on that one act, managed to leak into his overall resentment.

‘And he throws all his spars and fights,’ Haruki added almost off-handedly. ‘He could defeat me in two steps if he wanted to.’

Klaus made a sound of annoyance. ‘I didn’t think it was possible for me to like him even less.’

Despite the words, despite the fact that Klaus still hadn’t looked directly at him, Haruki looked at him with his spirits lifting very slightly. It sounded like Klaus had not only believed him but accepted it without any skepticism, which Haruki hadn't expected at all. He wondered why.

He didn't know that Klaus was lost in another time; the only other time he had heard of something like that. But he knew that that dark corner of the compound, on the eve of an important mission, was not the time and place to bring up the secret of Hans Regenwalde. And so he didn’t say anything at all. Besides all of that, it occurred to him that the gods had selected the perfect candidate to dole out his punishment, as short-lived as it was.  
  
Haruki glanced at his posture. The bruises and the tired look in his eye. His hair and jacket collar were swept up in a short gust of wind. The first wind of summer.

'Klaus, you don't have to go.'  
  
After a few seconds, Klaus finally lifted his eyes to look at him. He knew Haruki was talking about the mission that day, but Klaus heard it as though Haruki was responding to something he didn’t yet know about.

'Ryoumei can – can find another pilot at the base,’ Haruki said in a sort of calm desperation, aware of how dangerous that idea was. ‘He said he already had a few in mind. And...'  
  
But he trailed off, caught in the silent intensity of Klaus' gaze. The wind picked up and blew through the small valley between them, trailing clothes and hair and scattering a few leaves.  
  
'Let me do this,' Klaus said gently.  
  
_This one final thing for you. Before I leave for good.  
_  
Haruki stared for a few more seconds, his eyes so deep that Klaus felt himself falling again. He was grateful when Haruki finally looked away and nodded.

Footsteps behind them made them turn. Kolya walked towards them dressed in camouflage and carrying a knapsack. Guns glinted in their holsters at his hips.

The brief look that he shared with Klaus carried a roiling, deep-seeded animosity that went both ways. Klaus glared and Kolya glowered. It was with a concentrated power of will that they shelved it all, in silence, for the sake of the mission. For the sake of their commander.

Kolya then glanced at his master and waited to receive a nod before he walked on towards the jeep.

Out of the corner of his eye, Klaus thought he saw Haruki's jade coat flapping around his shins. But when he focused, he realised Haruki wasn’t wearing it. It had been months since winter, after all. He wondered what it was that he had just seen.

‘I’ll see you around, kid,’ he said, trying to sound upbeat so that his commander wouldn’t worry. He turned and held Haruki’s gaze for longer than he felt he deserved before he turned to follow Kolya.

And then it was like a small burst of intuition came to Haruki from out of nowhere. He looked up suddenly, seized by the idea that Klaus wasn’t planning to return.

‘Come – come back, okay?’

The suddenness of the words, their familiarity and simple appeal, made Klaus stop short. He almost sighed. A second later, he turned and retraced the few steps he had already taken.

He took Haruki’s hand and pressed it to his lips for the second time, their gazes locked.

And that time, Klaus saw the deep flush that took over Haruki's face.  
  
And though he couldn't be sure amidst the crippling guilt and overwhelming regret, amidst all the self-loathing and stoic fatalism, he thought he felt something far stronger course through him, stronger than everything else. Something he had only known once before in his life.  
  
He turned from Haruki and walked to the jeep, heavy with the weight of it all.  
  
And Haruki stood alone by the west exit, watching it slip quietly into the night. He had already reached out his left hand by the time he remembered that Kaiser was no longer there.

* * *

At the tip of Tachibana’s province in the nation’s north, Meiji lay in his futon with his long curtain of black hair spread around him.

He stared at the dark night beyond the window. He had always enjoyed the tilted perspective of the night sky from a futon. During the seven years he had slept in a large bed in the Imperial Palace, he had almost forgotten the feeling.

He lay awake and tried to calculate how long exactly he had been held there. After Tachibana had forcibly removed him from power, he had almost immediately been brought to that room. He had no idea what had happened to Natsume or anyone else in the palace who had been loyal to him. He hadn’t been allowed contact with anyone and he hadn’t seen a single newspaper nor heard so much as a snippet of news from any radio. For all he knew, the world had turned into a wasteland beyond the grounds of the Tachibana winter residence.

He wondered, sometimes, why Tachibana hadn’t dealt with him more permanently. He certainly seemed ruthless enough. In the three years since he’d been brought there, Meiji had more time for speculation than anything else. And he realised that perhaps Tachibana, who had always been devoutly religious, harboured some deep-seated anxieties about having dethroned the rightful Son of Heaven and couldn’t bring himself to do anything more damning. The thought amused Meiji from time to time, since he himself had never once believed in gods or divinity.

As far as life sentences went, which he assumed was the case in his case, he was comfortable enough. The room was bare but almost homely. The food was edible and the guards who brought it, and who escorted him to the bathroom and back, never mistreated him. They even, very occasionally, spoke to him, though they were careful never to speak about anything of consequence.

On top of that, he had experienced a similar confinement before.

His father had kept him under lock and key for a long time after a scandal that had threatened to mar the family name. A great deal of Meiji’s seventeenth year had been spent in his room, waiting for someone to return to him.

Someone named Sotaro. His minder and his protector, who had been with him since he was a child. Someone Meiji had loved with his heart and body at age sixteen, and who had been torn from him on the awful night that they were discovered together.

Meiji’s year-long confinement, during which time Sotaro had been sent to fight in the war against Eurote, came to an end on the day his father unlocked his door and informed him that Sotaro had died in battle.

And so the real confinement for Meiji had begun then, on the day he was let out of his bedroom, in a place that was much harder to leave.

_I simply stopped. I stopped being rebellious. I stopped caring. I settled into my duties without complaint. When the time came, I accepted the title of shogun but avoided the limelight in almost every respect. I suppose it all must have been a kind of… resignation._

In all the years since it had happened, Meiji had spoken of it only once; to Klaus von Wolfstadt as they smoked a cigarette together in a courtyard in Eurote. He had tried to summarise the bottomless horror of being discovered and the unending grief of his loss in just a few words. Even then, he had been careful not to mention Sotaro’s name, which still caused him pain decades later.

Meiji sighed and tried to close his eyes. For some reason, sleep was being elusive that night. During sporadic bouts of insomnia like those, he felt every bit as old as his forty-three years.

He wondered about Klaus. He wondered about Klaus and Taki and hoped they had finally found happiness in their quiet corner of the west. He hoped Natsume was alright. He hoped Tachibana had taken the throne with grace and wisdom. He hoped that peace reigned between nations.

Because he had a feeling that every single one of his hopes was misplaced, he fell back on thoughts of Sotaro, like he always did.

And so the rightful Son of Heaven lay in his futon in a captivity that felt almost familiar, staring up at a tilted rectangle of sky, and thought of someone he had lost twenty-six years ago. Someone whose last words to him were a promise that he would return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Haruki's risky little speech inviting Ryoumei to join the revolution was inspired by a similar line spoken by Claus von Stauffenberg (CAN I GET A WTF OVER THE NAME COINCIDENCE) in the political thriller, _Valkyrie_. Claus was a high-ranking officer in the German army who led a military coup that almost succeeded in overthrowing Hitler's regime. Though he failed, he was one seriously amazing human being and I've seen that movie several times over because it's that good. (Also Tom Cruise did a wonderful job playing Claus von Stauffenberg, but I don't see him quite measuring up to our Klaus haha. For one thing, our boy is 6'4, sorry Tom.)
> 
> Also, 'victory of the people' much? It's like there really is something to the name Klaus/Claus. I wonder if Inariya-sama picked it for a reason.


	60. Hover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone,
> 
> A repeat notice: just in case there’s anyone who read Chapter 57 early and missed it, I added a scene towards the start where Klaus lights a cigarette and tells Haruki what happened that day in the shed ten years ago when Haruki came asking to borrow Klaus’ gun. The scene ends with Haruki returning to his office, thinking about Klaus and Taki’s relationship. Sorry to anyone who missed it. I had intended to put it in a different chapter but the wonderful Georgia, to whom I sent the scene, helped me realise it definitely belonged there (thank you, dear).
> 
> Also a quick apology to all those who were assured that Chapter 60 would come soon and ended up having to wait days! I will stop making promises I can’t keep…
> 
> …right after I make this promise: I plan to finish the whole story before my birthday in late April (at which point, I will no longer be 26 and therefore no longer the same age as canon-Klaus #symbolicdeadline #fornorealreason).
> 
> According to current estimates, there’s only seven chapters to go before it’s all over!
> 
> If I haven’t said it WAY too many times before, I love you all for reading and I especially love my wonderful commenters for their far-too-generous love. You’re all amazing!
> 
> Hope you guys keep enjoying! Xx

Kolya sat by the open door of the airplane. The night air roared by, clouds turning into frantic little wisps of vapour that tore past, all of it unnaturally loud behind the propellers. And yet, in Kolya’s head there was an almost eerie calm. It was the calm that had always preceded his missions. He stared down into the void and already imagined falling through it.  
  
It was a small paratrooper plane designed for tight-knit special ops teams. He sat near the narrow entrance to the cockpit behind Ryoumei, who was in the co-pilot’s seat. Klaus sat to his left, gently guiding the plane. They spoke to one another softly through their headset radios.  
  
Kolya was gratified to see the bruises and cuts on Klaus’ face, obvious even from beneath the microphone boom of the headset and in the darkness of the plane. All he had to do was remember finding Haruki in the bathroom looking broken and dazed and he felt that same itch in his knuckles to cause pain.  
  
Then Ryoumei turned and indicated over his head. Kolya leaned in so he could hear Ryoumei over the din coming through the open door.  
  
‘We’re descending now. We’ll be over the grounds soon. Drop mark when we cross the perimeter, which should land you on the north side of the lake.’  
  
Kolya nodded.

A small detail then occurred to Klaus. Kolya had arrived in the country only two years ago; after Meiji had already been dethroned.

‘Do you know who Meiji even is? What he looks like?’

Kolya hesitated.

‘I... may have seen a picture. Once.’ He tried to recall a newspaper he had glanced through, in passing, years ago.

‘Great.’

Klaus couldn't help but find it amusing. For all of their planning, it appeared the only person in the entire nation who didn't know what Meiji looked like was the one being sent in to rescue him.

‘Long hair. Pretty face. You can’t miss him.’

Kolya seemed to hesitate again, eyes once more on the clouds zipping by like ghosts.

‘What now?’ Klaus said a little icily, sensing his unease. He couldn't help but feel gratified wondering if, despite all of Kolya's gifts, he was having cold feet about the mission.

‘How do I address him?’ Kolya finally asked.

‘What?’

‘I don't know how to address eastern royalty,’ Kolya said in an even tone. ‘I have only ever called sir “sir”.’

Klaus stared.

‘Is that a joke? You’re about to fall out of a plane and that’s what you’re worried about?’

When Kolya’s deadpan gaze refused to lift, Klaus sighed and gave in. He also found it the perfect amount of ironic that he was suddenly an authority on etiquette.

‘Sama,’ he said finally. ‘Meiji-sama.’

Kolya nodded.

They looked at one another for a moment longer before Kolya turned and went to the door.  
  
On Ryoumei’s mark, Kolya dropped through empty air.

* * *

As the night crawled slowly by, Haruki and Hasebe remained in Haruki’s office, occasionally scrolling through military channels on a transceiver. They both knew that neither of them would be able to sleep much that night.

It made little difference, though, whether they were awake or not. The mission called for radio silence and there was no way they could communicate with Klaus in the plane or with Kolya when he reached the ground. Haruki supposed that a part of him was waiting with bated breath to hear of a suspicious plane being flagged by the air force.

He then realised he had awoken to a reality where the three people he cared most about in the world were on a plane that could be legally shot out of the sky if anyone caught wind of what it was doing.

* * *

He thought of various things as he fell. Mostly, he thought of how in those few minutes, more than at any other time, he could feel the unrelenting weight of his own body. It plummeted without mercy through bottomless air. The wind tore at the exposed skin around his goggles and howled in his ears.  
  
He realised it was his first ever solo drop. And he felt a pang of loss, one he rarely permitted himself to feel, for the men in his squad who had died beside him on a street in his motherland.  
  
The chute deployed on cue. The world beneath him swayed. 

The grounds of the Tachibana winter residence was several times the size of the Imperial Palace. It spanned almost fifty acres, at the northern edge of which was the residence itself. Though the perimeter walls were tall and closely guarded by patrols and frequent checkpoints, the grounds within were large enough for one to drop into their midst from above without detection. He saw the snake-like line of the perimeter wall and the shining mass of the lake. As he fell further he saw the black dots of the perimeter guards on the far side of the grounds. No one where he was to land.

As always, the ground rushed up to meet him far too quickly during the final, lethal few metres. But he landed deftly. His slipped his harness off his shoulders and his chute peeled away as he ran. He could imagine, without needing to see, how the chute rippled and billowed before deflating and being lost in the overgrown grass behind him like nothing more than another vapour cloud. Like the old life he had once shed.

* * *

Meiji opened his eyes and saw the tilted rectangle of sky through the window. He stared at the star-strewn night and wondered what had woken him. And then there was a distant sound. A boom made quiet by distance. Meiji lifted his head, wondering if it was anything to be worried about.

Less than half a minute later, there was an immense crash somewhere near his door. He recognised the voice of the guard he sometimes spoke to. He was calling out in alarm. And then crying out in pain. Meiji sat upright in the futon, his heart suddenly racing, and his hair fell over his eyes. Before he had the chance to stand or even brush his hair away, the heavy sliding door of the bedroom was torn off. Straight off its railings. And tossed aside.  
  
And a huge figure stood in the doorway, his shoulder span almost eclipsing it.

When Meiji and Kolya laid eyes on one another for the first time, there was same energy in the air, the same esoteric pause, as when a young Klaus parted the wisteria arms and saw a boy standing beneath the swaying purple flowers.  
  
Kolya, chest heaving only slightly, stared in a slight daze at the man who sat up in the futon. Despite Klaus’ brief, blunt description, he had been expecting a stiff bureaucrat in his forties; someone who had managed to resemble Tachibana in his mind. The one before him, however, seemed to be a great deal younger than he was supposed to be, with high, delicate cheekbones and hair that was long enough to reach the futon falling over his face and eyes. Eyes that were wide in either shock or fear or both.  
  
A man Kolya had never seen before. But a face he knew.  
  
The spell broke when the guard whose arm he had broken groaned and whimpered from around the corner. And Kolya blinked and focused, remembering what he was doing there.  
  
‘Meiji-sama,’ he said.

Meiji felt a strange flare at the rumbling depth of his voice. He stared at the man’s formidable shape in the camouflage uniform that blended him into the night. He then stared again at the door that had been torn off its tracks.

‘My name is Kolya di – my name is Kolya Volkov. I have been sent by Commander Haruki Yamamoto and Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt to bring you to –’  
  
There were shouts echoing from within the building. Meiji glanced around in alarm but Kolya only seemed irritated at having been interrupted.

‘– to bring you to the Fifteenth Armoured Division, where –’  
  
‘Alright,’ Meiji said quickly when the voices in the residence seemed to get louder. Hearing Klaus’ name had been enough for him to trust the soldier completely. He got to his feet and pulled his hair back with the elastic tie on his wrist.  
  
Kolya was almost surprised when Meiji swiftly approached him. Narrow, half-lidded eyes and a slender frame beneath a navy yukata.  
  
‘What?’ he heard himself say thickly.  
  
‘I said alright,’ Meiji said, his voice strangely hypnotic even when he spoke hurriedly. ‘I accept your offer of rescue. Shall we go?’  
  
Kolya gathered himself in time, wondering what had come over him. ‘Yes.’  
  
Up close, Meiji caught a flash of green eyes before the soldier turned to make sure the coast was clear. Meiji stepped out into hallway on the stranger’s heels with his heart still beating far too quickly.

* * *

A few minutes after their crew count went from three to two, Ryoumei radioed in to the nearest airfield. In order to account for their impending disappearance from the radar, he reported that he was experiencing difficulties during his routine patrol and would be executing an emergency landing. He didn’t specify where. He cut the radio off prematurely to indicate trouble with comms.  
  
Then Klaus switched off all of their guiding lights and coasted them down in an arc over the sea and back to the inlet. As they approached they saw that there was more tree growth on the land bridge than the photos had shown. Ryoumei glanced at Klaus nervously but he didn’t bat an eyelid.  
  
They touched down on grass bordered by sand and came to a stop just short of the tree line.  
  
They switched off both engines immediately. The plane powered down around them, the blur of propellers slowly resolving into blades. No houses or buildings or settlements for miles. Only trees. Klaus remembered having once reluctantly thought that Tachibana’s province had a pristine, untouched beauty.  
  
They slipped off their headsets and breathed quietly in the still air, wondering if sirens or the drone of another plane would follow. When they heard nothing, they tried to relax.  
  
If all went as planned, Kolya and Meiji would find them in two hours and they could resume their supposed patrol back to base.  
  
‘Keep the back hatch unlocked,’ Klaus said.  
  
Ryoumei climbed out of the co-pilot’s seat. Klaus tried to peer in the direction of the Tachibana residence but, as he expected, his vision was obscured by the trees and rise in the land. The future of the nation, Klaus realised, now rested in Kolya’s hands.  
  
Ryoumei sat and stretched on one of the paratroopers’ seats that ran along the length of the plane. He glanced at Klaus who was adjusting his binoculars even though he knew they wouldn’t be able to get a decent view of anything.  
  
It occurred to Ryoumei that despite Klaus being in charge of the mission, as far as ranks went, they were both captains. Which meant he could afford to be a little impetuous.  
  
‘So,’ he said after a few minutes of silence. ‘Why’d Kolya beat you up?’  
  
He wasn’t surprised when Klaus said nothing.  
  
‘That’s what Haruki said too,’ Ryoumei wryly observed.  
  
Klaus’ stomach churned at the thought of Haruki remaining silent on Klaus’ behalf. He put the binoculars aside and reached for a cigarette. Ryoumei looked up at the sound of the lighter.  
  
‘Mind if I bum one?’  
  
Klaus tossed him the pack.  
  
‘Haven’t had a smoke since I got married. Keiko’s going to kill me.’  
  
‘You’re committing high treason,’ Klaus pointed out. ‘It’s a good enough excuse.’  
  
Ryoumei grunted in appreciation before tossing it back. He welcomed the warmth of the first drag and exhaled with his eyes closed.

* * *

Kolya had been relatively lucky so far. In Haruki’s office the previous day, Douman had pointed out the three wings in the house where Meiji was most likely being kept. Kolya had crept around the outside of the south wing and picked the lock, quiet as a shadow, to discover that it was empty. The second wing was the old servant’s quarters, and the guard snoozing by the courtyard entrance had been enough of a sign. Kolya had then taken out the carefully wrapped pencil detonator from his knapsack. He crushed the copper section of the tube, and left it by the empty south wing.

He waited in the shadows of the courtyard until the small explosion roused the guard on duty. As he had hoped, the other guards around the residence also flocked to the south wing. He had then moved through the servants quarters, checking all the rooms, before he spied a closed door at the end of the hallway where a guard had remained somewhat nervously at his post.

The guard now lay on the floor, clutching his broken arm, as Kolya and Meiji sped through the residence.

The corridors unwound before them like a maze. Meiji deferred entirely to Kolya, who seemed to know exactly where he was going. He wondered if it owed to his captivity that he was so easily disoriented after only a few turns. Kolya also seemed to know where to go in order to avoid the various guards and patrols stationed around the residence. Meiji suspected he had taken a roundabout route just for that purpose.

They only had one tense brush with a guard right before they took a side exit into a courtyard. But Meiji only saw a flash of black in the moonlit doorway before Kolya pushed him out of the way into an adjoining corridor. From there, all Meiji could see was Kolya aiming and firing, gun held in both hands and head tilted at an angle, his gaze deadly.

Meiji heard the cry of the guard and tried not to imagine what had happened. It occurred to him almost surreally that people’s lives were ending in his name.

But when Kolya reached for his arm and pulled him towards the doorway, he tried to push those thoughts aside. They stepped over the body and ran into the cool night air. It was the first time Meiji had left the residence in three years.

And he realised very quickly that his confinement in a single level of the residence had impaired his fitness. After only a minute of sprinting across the courtyard and into the outer grounds, he realised that he was already running out of breath, that his indoor shoes provided very little traction and that Kolya’s grip on his arm was tightening.

‘Are you okay?’ Kolya asked.

‘Yes,’ Meiji gasped.

But Kolya stopped at once and pulled him behind the cover of a tree. Meiji doubled up and breathed heavily, his hair falling over his shoulder.

As Kolya waited for him to catch his breath, he kept an eye on the movements in the huge building they had just left. Lights were being switched on in corridors and orders being barked.

‘It will take us almost two hours on foot to reach the plane,’ he said. ‘Will you be able to make it?’

Meiji nodded.

* * *

At that moment, Tachibana was being awoken by one of his attendants in the Imperial Palace. He was told that the call came through on a certain line that had remained silent for three years.

In his office, he paled as he listened to the tense, breathless voice of the head of security at the winter residence.

‘All three bridges,’ Tachibana said at once. ‘No one in or out.’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

* * *

The residence was located at the tip of the peninsula, where the sea curved into the land through a wide inlet. Three bridges crossed the inlet onto the grounds. The westernmost bridge was the quickest route to the natural, tree-filled land-bridge stretching across the peninsula, where a small paratrooper plane waited in the darkness.

If all went as planned, Kolya and Meiji would reach the western bridge before the guards had cottoned on to the fact that Meiji had even managed to escape the building itself.

But neither he nor Klaus nor Haruki knew that Tachibana had learned from what had happened in No Man’s Land ten years ago. The way that Taki Reizen had been plucked straight out of a nest of enemy soldiers – by only a handful of his men – had always unsettled Tachibana, never more so than when he found the need to detain Meiji on a permanent basis.

And so, since the first day of Meiji’s internment, all three bridges connecting the grounds of the winter residence with the mainland were rigged with explosives.

There wasn’t much that Tachibana could do about the eastern edge of the grounds, which simply curved around the inlet and back onto the mainland. But he took comfort in the fact that that particular stretch of land was heavily forested and didn’t offer a tempting escape route.

He tried to take comfort in that, and in the decisiveness of his guard’s voice, as he set the phone down.

And miles away from him, his order lit up the night.

By then, Kolya and Meiji had made it over a rise where they could see past the edge of the grounds to the the ocean sparkling beneath a half-moon. They watched their escape route half a mile in the distance disappear behind a quick, striking sequence of explosions. Even before the dust settled, simply by feeling it through the soles of his feet and hearing the specific cracks of brick and tar, Kolya suspected what happened.

Meiji gasped at the sight and felt his heart sink.

And it lifted again, tentatively, when Kolya only spent a moment looking out at the buckling bridges before he turned swiftly on his heel and led Meiji back the way they came.

* * *

Klaus and Ryoumei jumped when they heard the distant muffled booms of explosions. Ryoumei got to his feet and approached the cockpit where Klaus was already training his binoculars out of the windshield.

‘What the hell was that?’

Klaus couldn’t make out anything beyond the orange flare of the explosions. Three of them on the edge of the inlet in the distance. He lowered the binoculars.

‘Hand me the maps.’

Ryoumei found the maps and blueprints they had taken from Haruki’s office. Klaus unrolled one of them across the controls of the cockpit. He scanned the structures surrounding the residence and confirmed that there were three bridges leading out of the grounds.

‘I think they’ve blown the bridges.’

‘Shit.’

Klaus’ eyes roamed over the eastern edge of the grounds. A large swell of forest land that curved around the inlet.

‘There’s another way around. If Kolya has Meiji-sama, he’ll take them around the inlet and down this way to avoid the coast.’ He traced the path with a finger.

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s what I’d do,’ Klaus admitted slightly begrudgingly. ‘But it’ll take them until daybreak to get here.’

Ryoumei was immediately worried.

‘The airfield will send someone to find us if they don’t hear from us soon.’

‘We’ll patch through in short bursts and make up some bullshit to keep them off our tails.’

Ryoumei wasn’t convinced.

‘Someone’ll report that a plane went down near here. And it sounds like Tachibana knows someone’s trying to spring Meiji-sama. We’ll be lucky if this whole peninsula isn’t crawling with his men before morning.’

Klaus shot him a look. ‘You have a better plan?’

‘No, just complaining.’

Restlessness crawled over Klaus’ skin like an itch. He got to his feet and paced the short length of the plane. He couldn’t stand missions where he was idle and helpless. He wished there was some way he could meet them halfway. Or at least contact Kolya over the radio to find out whether Meiji had been secured. But radio silence meant there was nothing to do but wait and hope.

‘They’ll make it,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here by morning.’

Ryoumei, his face drawn, sank into his seat in the cockpit and asked for another cigarette.

* * *

The heat slowly spreading from the south hadn’t yet reached the nation’s northernmost point and a cold ocean breeze swept over the peninsula.

And Kolya and Meiji moved swiftly through the cool air and trees with the wind tugging at the clouds and canopy and at Meiji’s clothes and hair. The stagnation of his confinement had been immediately and spectacularly wrenched off its hinges in a way that he hadn’t fully come to terms with yet. He couldn’t quite fathom the silvery moon or the speed at which the trees whipped by. Or the sudden existence and closeness of the man who had come to break him out.

As Kolya had hoped, most of the guards had been called into the main residence and only two were left to mind the back gate. He warned Meiji to stay where he was, out of sight, as he took them down, one after the other. Now, he hoped to put as much distance between themselves and the perimeter wall as possible. He kept his eyes trained directly ahead and his ears peeled for footfalls. It seemed they were well ahead of the guards and Kolya wanted to keep it that way.

But he stopped whenever he sensed that Meiji was nearing the end of his tether. Each time he waited for Meiji to recover, he would stare behind them, trying to see through the gloom.

And sometimes he would spare a glance down at Meiji himself.

He breathed in a scent that only coasted to him in bursts. He thought at first it was something in the trees around him. It reminded him of the crisp, sweet smell of leaves after rain. But he realised at length that it came from Meiji, from his hair or skin or clothes.

Meiji was clutching a stitch in his side and leaning against a tree for support. They had been moving briskly for over two hours.

That was when Kolya realised that he couldn’t expect Meiji to make the full six-hour trek to the plane in one hit. Sometimes it still took Kolya a while to remember that the people around him weren’t capable of the same things he was.

He hesitated on the point of asking a question before he decided against it.

The only thing that stopped him from offering to carry the rightful emperor of the east was the very fact that it would require him to inappropriately offer to carry the rightful emperor of the east.

‘I apologise,’ Meiji said when his lungs no longer felt like they were burning. He hated what the past few years of idleness had done to his body. ‘As I feared, I’m... not as young as I used to be.’

He pulled his hair away from his face and tied it back once more.

Kolya found that his eye was again drawn, this time to the way Meiji's arms moved as he did so.

He couldn’t see Meiji’s face clearly in the darkness between trees. And yet…

‘It will take a long time to reach the land-bridge,’ he said, trying to keep focus. ‘We will rest first.’

‘Alright,’ Meiji said, trying not to sound too relieved.

A falling branch made Kolya’s head snap around. He didn’t like the idea of sitting in the middle of the woods where there was no cover. But he had a place in mind.

‘If shit hits the fan,’ Klaus had said on the plane, marking a place on the map and handing it back to Kolya. ‘There’s an old factory warehouse I know, two or three hours east of the residence. Tachibana used it to build his weapons, but it’s probably been abandoned now.’

Though Kolya didn’t like the casual interjection of the word ‘probably’, he knew it was their safest bet. He told Meiji it would take another hour before they were able to stop again. Meiji’s heart fell but he simply nodded again. And he was relieved when the soldier took up a much slower pace than before. Kolya also drew out a map and consulted it, along with a compass, whenever he found a patch of clear moonlight.

Even when they reached the edge of the tree line and saw the chain-link fence and warehouse beyond, he remained there for a full half-hour. His diligence was rewarded; a jeep with Tachibana’s guards arrived and scoured the warehouse and the grounds before leaving again.

They drew up to the chain link fence. Kolya considered the fence and Meiji and his options. He didn’t think Meiji could scale it in his state. He could tell Meiji to hold onto his back and shoulders as he climbed. But, again, it seemed to him that such a suggestion would carry a certain inappropriateness that he wanted to avoid. And so, with only a small degree of hesitation, he pulled the chain links apart with his hands.

Enough surreal things had happened that night to make it so that Meiji wasn’t exactly sure what he was watching. Whether it was possible or not. It seemed like it hovered somewhere on the border between the two.

Either way, over the next few seconds, Kolya had torn open a gap in the fence that was wide enough for them to squeeze through.

Kolya led him through the main factory warehouse, where broken conveyor belts stretched out into the darkness. Meiji wondered whether it was possibly the same warehouse he had sent Klaus into a decade ago. The one that had unearthed Tachibana’s plan.

They moved into a smaller room, where the sound didn’t echo as much and where there was only a small window set high in the thick brick wall. Rusty pieces of machinery hunkered in corners.

‘Wait here.’

Meiji felt a strange anxiety when Kolya left the room.

It was cold inside the warehouse and the temperature outside falling still. Meiji felt it through the thinness of his yukata. For a moment, he almost wished he was back in the comforting warmth of his futon in the room he had left behind.

That unnerving feeling left him straight away when Kolya returned with a small armful of kindling and swung his knapsack to the floor.

* * *

The fire was licking its way through the pile of dry sticks when Kolya walked back into the room from outside. He had stepped out again, just for a few seconds, to double check that the small, high window wasn’t giving them away from outside. And when he came back, he saw Meiji sitting by the fire in profile and Kolya felt as though everything had paused again, only for a moment, before he re-entered the room.

He sat on the other side of the fire and passed Meiji a small bottle of water from his knapsack. Meiji took it gratefully. His feet were sore and his limbs were stiff.

But he was free.

He tried to let that simple fact sink in, but it didn’t quite. He thought of the way the door got torn off its railings and cast aside.

He then looked up at the soldier just in time to see him look away.

‘Kolya, is it?’

Kolya caught his eye briefly before nodding once.

‘Thank you,’ Meiji said. ‘For getting me out.’

Kolya blinked, wondering what to say.

‘I’m just following orders,’ he said, stopping himself just before calling him ‘sir’, which he suspected was inappropriate. ‘Meiji-sama.’

‘Orders from Captain Wolfstadt?’

‘Yes,’ Kolya said after a reluctant pause.

Meiji smiled.

‘So he’s back.’ He was both happy at the thought and saddened that Klaus had left the peace of the west behind. ‘Is Taki with him?’

Kolya glanced up. ‘Taki Reizen?’

‘Yes.’

‘He died two years ago.’

The words didn’t quite resolve into meaning for a few seconds. Meiji stared across the fire, convinced for a moment that the soldier must be mistaken. There was a long silence.

And then the numb shock curled in at the edges and gave way to sorrow.

He suddenly remembered he had been fifteen when he first met the young prince. At two years old, Taki’s eyes already held an arresting depth.

‘How?’ he said quietly.

Kolya hesitated, trying to remember what Haruki had told him about the previous commander. ‘An illness. From exposure to the explosion at Roskilde.’

Meiji suddenly felt an overwhelming exhaustion. He had only asked a few questions and already the outside world had leaked in, in the most malicious way he could imagine.

And then he realised.

‘Oh, Klaus,’ he said, his voice just above a whisper.

The sorrow gripped him fully then. His heart was sore at the thought that Klaus had also been plunged into the kind of grief that Meiji knew all too well.

At that moment, something strange happened to Kolya. He realised that the inklings of possessiveness he had felt whenever he saw Klaus and Haruki together didn’t come anywhere close to the powerful surge of jealousy he felt simply upon hearing the way Meiji said Klaus’ name.

He had never felt anything quite so strong and irrational before. He dropped his gaze again and suddenly wished he was elsewhere.

‘Kolya,’ Meiji said.

It also made very little sense why the sound of his own name should suddenly move him so much. He forced himself to meet Meiji's gaze again.

‘I already owe you a great debt,’ Meiji continued and Kolya saw how tired he looked. ‘But I must ask you for another favour.’

Kolya waited.

And Meiji gently asked him to tell him everything he had missed.

* * *

Half an hour later, Meiji had fallen asleep beneath the camouflage jacket that Kolya had taken off and handed to him.

Kolya stared into the flames and occasionally threw another brittle stick onto the heap.

Unused as he was to talking, he had done his best to explain to Meiji what had happened in the world over the past three years. The new commander at the division and Tachibana and the _Hitobito no Shori_ and the war with the west and the terrifying new weapons.

Meiji had listened, unable to shake the feeling that he was entirely responsible for all of it. But he managed to retain his composure in front of Kolya. He set his lips in a firm line and remained silent.

And when he heard about what had happened in the past few days, the actions of Haruki Yamamoto and the arrest of General Nakamori and the proposal of Shoda, leader of the revolution, Meiji allowed himself to feel a ray of hope.

‘This commander of yours sounds rather remarkable,’ he said.

‘He is.’

Meiji glanced up at his emphatic tone. Even as he smiled at Kolya’s obvious devotion, he wondered about the emotion that had just run through him. There was something about the way Kolya spoke of Haruki that reminded him of the way Klaus had looked at Taki.

By then, he had reached his capacity for new information. His body was longing for rest. He asked how long they had before they had to leave again.

Kolya saw Meiji’s relief when he told him that he had time to sleep and that Kolya would wake him in an hour or so.

As Meiji lay down on his side on the hard ground and felt the fatigue claim him, he decided to ask one final question.

‘How old are you?’

Kolya seemed a little surprised.

‘Twenty-six,’ he replied.

Meiji stared for another few moments before closing his eyes. Then he gave a small, mysterious smile that Kolya suddenly wanted, more than anything, to understand.

‘Curious,’ Meiji murmured to himself.

Kolya now tried to avoid looking at Meiji where he slept.

He felt a strange new anxiety that he was only just managing to suppress, one that he didn’t understand and was almost afraid of. Not even when he agreed to take responsibility for Haruki’s life and safety back at the division had he felt it with such urgency; this sense that he had something precious in his charge and that it was up to him to deliver him safely. It was like all of the instincts he had followed his whole life had converged into a single point and he didn’t know what to do with it all.

So he kept feeding the fire. He checked their provisions for the trek ahead. He consulted the map. He got up and walked through the factory floor. He walked around the building in a quick patrol. He came back. And he found that he was still anxious.

He finally succumbed and stared at the emperor of the east lying beneath his jacket, striking and graceful and vaguely unreal. Kolya felt oafish and lumbering by comparison. He could still hear Meiji’s voice; low and smooth and hypnotic and somehow reminiscent of honey. Or silk.  
  
And his face...  
  
He couldn’t be sure. He had never really been sure.

He had thought, he had hoped, that the face he kept seeing in his dreams and visions had been Haruki’s. But now...

Suddenly, in only a few steps, he was crouching by Meiji’s sleeping form, a divine string pulling his hand towards the long lock of hair that had fallen over Meiji’s face.

He just wanted to brush it back. Just for a better look.

* * *

Meiji slept fitfully, just as he had done for years. That night, by the fire in an abandoned warehouse, he dreamed of the day that he decided he wouldn’t cut his hair.

His hair had been shorter when he was sixteen. It barely reached past his ears on the day that Sotaro climbed onto the horse that would take him far away. There was nothing Meiji could do. That helplessness welled up in his eyes and Sotaro saw it. He leaned down, in full view of Meiji’s father, to touch Meiji’s cheek and jaw and promise his young master that he would come back.

Meiji knew now that his decision not to cut his hair until the day Sotaro returned was a symptom of his helplessness, but it meant more, back then. It gave him back his power in the smallest way possible. It made him feel as though Sotaro was closer. And when he found out about Sotaro’s death a year later, his hair became the symbol of something else; a grief that would never end.

And then he opened his eyes to the feeling of a hand on his cheek. A hand on his cheek and jaw, in the same place that Sotaro had last touched him.

Green eyes with an intensity that was almost intimidating up close. A long, chiselled jaw lit by a dying fire. Meiji’s breath stopped in his throat. And still Kolya didn’t pull his hand away.

‘I know your face,’ Kolya murmured, staring as though still trying to remember. He didn’t notice that, in his slight daze, he had slipped back into Eurotean.

But Meiji understood.

And for the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to say. The words died on his tongue and all he could do was hold back the tears that suddenly sprang, lift himself off the floor, and kiss him.

It was a moment where disbelief and certainty had become indistinguishable. Kolya needed only a second to recover before he pulled him closer. Meiji rose into his body. Arms wrapped around his neck and he heard and felt the slight sound Meiji made against his mouth.

That was enough to send an electric surge straight to his cock. And from that point on, Kolya had to do everything in his power not to lose complete control of his hands and his body.

He pulled back to look at Meiji again, as though to greedily indulge in the sight of his face.

Meiji’s insides gave a painful jolt at the glint in Kolya’s eyes and he shivered at the sensation, brand-new and age-old, of huge hands roaming over his skin beneath his clothes. And then Kolya’s lips and tongue were on his neck, stubble grazing against his Adam’s apple, and warm, slow, insistent kisses found their way to his chest.

And Meiji ran his hands over the close-cropped hair behind Kolya’s ears and moaned.

Minutes later, the back of Meiji’s hand was pressed to his mouth and he winced and gasped, face flushed, as Kolya finally removed his fingers and mouth and made his way back up over Meiji’s body, running his lips over the shallow cavity of Meiji’s stomach, over the rise of his chest and then the side of his face. He buried his hands in Meiji’s hair which was spread about his face like rich, black satin.

And Meiji opened his eyes to see a look on Kolya’s face that was one of desperate need and also an appeal. So Meiji rose up once again to kiss him. He held onto Kolya’s neck and trembled only slightly, trying not to think about how it had been almost thirty years, when Kolya pushed into his body in one thrust.

* * *

There wasn’t enough room on Kolya’s jacket for them both, so Kolya made sure Meiji was lying on it. He was content to lie on the dusty floor right beside it. He held Meiji against him, their foreheads close, dark eyes staring into green. Disbelief and certainty. Breathing that was slowly returning to normal.

Kolya gazed at Meiji's beautiful face in the firelight and the long hair falling like water through his fingers and realised that everything that had happened in his life – the violent, merging currents and gently flowing streams alike – had been bringing him to that moment where he held a man had met only a handful of hours ago.

Neither had said a thing since the soft words Kolya had spoken in Eurotean.

Meiji, who had never once believed in gods or divinity or the endless cycle of lives, stared at Kolya Volkov and wondered for the first time if it was possible. It seemed, again, to hover on the border between possible and not.  
  
He fell asleep. He slept sounder there, on a dusty warehouse floor in the arms of a stranger, than he had at any other point in the past twenty-six years.

* * *

An hour later, Kolya gently and reluctantly woke him.

They slipped through the gap in the chain-link fence and back into the trees.  
  
Meiji had misplaced his tie and his hair fell over his shoulders all the way past his hips. He had tried to tie it back into a self-contained loop but it fell apart in only minutes.  
  
Kolya watched him out of the corner of his eye whenever he could. As though to confirm he was real. And still there.

He knew now that he had finally found him. Whatever it was he had spent his whole life trying to find was now walking beside him through the trees in that cold province in the north. Even meeting Haruki and following him to the east had all, all of it, been for this.  
  
But he didn’t know what it meant. Or what the previous few hours meant. He felt heat rise to his face when he remembered the way Meiji had arched his back and the way his hair had felt clutched in Kolya’s hand. That smooth, hypnotic voice painted in new, high-strung moans. And Kolya had focused as much on himself as he did Meiji, aware that an unrestrained grip or plunge or could very seriously hurt him. He had stayed awake with Meiji in his arms, pressed against the length of his body, and realised he had just defiled the Son of Heaven. Even worse, he had taken advantage of someone whose life was in his hands. He hadn’t even stopped to ask permission.  
  
He wondered, suddenly, if that made him any better than Klaus.  
  
He turned to glance over his shoulder. Meiji was walking a little behind him and to his right.  
  
‘I’m sorry for... what I did.’  
  
Meiji’s stomach gave a little lurch. Kolya's face was half-turned towards him but he couldn't make out Kolya's features in the darkness.  
  
‘It – I didn’t...’ Kolya said and started again. He was prepared, already, for his words to let him down, like they always did. ‘It might be that I took advantage of... the situation. If that is how you –’  
  
Meiji arched his eyebrows at the Eurotean’s awkward formality. It was quite a departure from the almost overbearing way his hands and mouth had taken over Meiji’s body only hours ago. He couldn’t help but let out a bemused chuckle that spoke of the surreal turn his life had taken.  
  
The sound of his soft laugh made Kolya stop and look down. Meiji stopped too.  
  
The kiss that followed carried all the markings of one that had spanned lifetimes. A feeling that came from outside their bodies even more so than within. A sense that the weight of history and fate were behind them and that their lives had already been written by the hand of another.  
  
Feeling dazed again, Kolya brushed Meiji's hair out of his face and thought of the small elastic tie he had found on the floor of the warehouse and guiltily slipped into his pocket.

* * *

Kolya suddenly wanted to know more. He suddenly wanted to know where Meiji had been while Kolya had been elsewhere.  
  
The question was vast and sweeping and he could only articulate enough to ask why Meiji had abdicated the throne. Why he had been held captive for so long.  
  
Meiji paused before he answered. The guilt of having bowed to a tyrant, and all the destruction that followed on the heels of that decision, still weighed on him.  
  
‘Tachibana had three warehouses that we shut down,’ Meiji said, his voice low. ‘But it seems there was a fourth we missed. After Roskilde, he kept developing nuclear technology with teams of researchers that fled Eurote after the first war, and with Nakamori's backing. After seven years, the technology was weaponised. And they threatened to use them on our own people.’  
  
Kolya looked at him in surprise.

Meiji was thinking about the day that Tachibana and Nakamori had approached him in his office at the Imperial Palace. Another Roskilde. They would let their new beasts fly. They would find a way to blame it on the west and spark a new war. All if Meiji didn’t agree to abdicate and name Tachibana his successor.  
  
_I want us to be a force to be reckoned with, like we were in times of old,_ Tachibana had said. _I want us to be able to hold our heads high._

 _And you think_ _this_ _is how to do it?_ Meiji had replied.

He knew it hadn’t been an idle threat. He knew his hand had been forced. And yet he knew that he hadn’t prevented anything in the long run. Tachibana finally had his war with the west. And the throne. All Meiji had done was save those he had been able to save, and now he knew it had come at a huge cost.  
  
Kolya thought he saw in Meiji the kind of complex guilt he had seen in Haruki. He wondered what that kind of burden must be like.  
  
‘I promised Captain Wolfstadt there wouldn’t be another war for as long as I had the throne,’ Meiji mused.  
  
Kolya again felt that visceral dislike over hearing Meiji say Klaus' name.  
  
Meiji, meanwhile, wondered about the captain. The master he had lost.  
  
‘Why did he come back?’ he asked.  
  
Kolya often wondered the same.   
  
‘My master asked for him,’ he replied, after a pause.  
  
Klaus must care for the new commander a great deal, Meiji realised, if he was able to leave such grief behind. He wondered.  
  
He then thought of the way Kolya had phrased his answer. As they kept walking, his eyes darted to Kolya and back, feeling a strange twist of sadness at the fact that Kolya already had a master. He wondered again.

* * *

When the trees finally began thinning out, dawn was on the point of breaking. There was a golden line in the east where the sea met the sky. A grey light had graced the forest and the slope which they climbed down. Birds called and the air was filled with smell of dew on leaves, which Kolya had caught in whiffs in Meiji’s hair and neck a few hours ago.  
  
Dawn meant neither they nor the plane could rely on the cover of darkness for much longer. Kolya quickened his pace slightly. They reached the bottom of the slope and slipped past the last few trees to see the land-bridge stretching before them, straight across to the other side of the bay. It was still too dark to see whether the outline of a paratrooper airplane was hunkering against the trees. He could only hope that Klaus and Ryoumei were still waiting for them.  
  
Over eight hours had passed since Kolya ripped Meiji’s door from its tracks. They had only stopped at the warehouse for a short while. He glanced down but Meiji seemed to be keeping up well. He felt an odd ripple of pride.   
  
They held their breath as they crossed over the sandy bank in open air and onto the land-bridge where the pine trees sheltered them again. Kolya didn’t know where exactly the plane would be. They crept through the trees for what felt like a long time, listening to birds and crickets and the ocean, and kept their eyes peeled.

And finally, just beyond the trees on the northern bank, they saw it. It was parked at the end of a long strip of grass, edged by sand, edged by sea.  
  
The propellers revved to life as they approached; a sudden, startling sound. The back hatch swung open and the fact that he was free properly caught up with Meiji then, when he saw a familiar face – golden hair and eyes and wide grin – for the first time in ten years.  
  
‘It’s damn good to see you, Meiji-sama,’ Klaus said, holding out his hand.  
  
‘Likewise, old friend.’  
  
Klaus met Kolya’s eye after he pulled Meiji onto the plane.  
  
‘You’re late,’ he reproached.  
  
He didn’t quite understand the look Kolya shot him but it gave him a strange sense of satisfaction.

* * *

The plane turned, sped down the length of the land-bridge and took off into the sky above the ocean. The golden line of the horizon expanded beneath them.  
  
After Klaus turned and levelled off in the direction of Ryoumei’s base, he handed the controls over to Ryoumei and climbed out of the cockpit. Meiji and Kolya sat in the paratroopers’ seats along the side of the plane. Klaus was reluctant, at first, to ask Meiji questions, unsure what he had been through over the past three years, but the former and rightful emperor seemed willing to talk. He explained everything he had already explained to Kolya.  
  
‘They made me write missives every few months,’ Meiji reflected. ‘I presumed it was so that no one would come looking for me.’  
  
‘I told everyone who would listen that you didn’t run off to some shrine in the mountains.’  
  
‘It was almost amusing, in a way,’ Meiji said lightly. ‘To imagine having had a spiritual epiphany and being eager for repentance.’  
  
‘You did smoke that cigarette,’ Klaus pointed out with a grin. ‘The one that started a revolution in Eurote, remember? I was a little worried you still felt bad about that. Maybe enough to abdicate.’

Meiji chuckled again. Klaus stood before him near the cockpit door, one arm up and holding onto a metal rafter on the ceiling of the plane for support.   
  
From beside Meiji, Kolya silently listened to them and fought the kind of jealousy that Taki had experienced once before. It was strong enough that he got up and moved towards the small supplies hatch at the back of the plane, with a mind to finding a blanket and more water and so that he would be forced to uncurl his fists.

Meiji watched him for a few moments.

‘Captain,’ he said, his tone a little different. ‘What do you know about that young Eurotean?’

Klaus followed his gaze.

Too much, he thought dryly.

‘Just that he packs a punch,’ he said, his tone deceptively light, still feeling a dull ache in his jaw. ‘Why?’

Meiji was silent again.

‘Do you recall what I told you that day in Eurote? About the bodyguard who was killed in the war?’

Klaus needed a second, but then the conversation came back to him vividly.

‘Yeah.’

There was a pause filled by the loud hum of propellers. Meiji then realised he couldn’t possibly hope to explain the past eight hours. So he settled for a small detail.

‘Kolya was born in the same year that Sotaro died,’ he said, saying his name aloud for the first time.

The implication took a little while to take shape. And then, from out of nowhere, Klaus recalled a dark-skinned girl in a bar in Braxton. He distinctly remembered how much she had reminded him of his mother, and how he even toyed with that impossible idea when he discovered that she was born shortly after Beatrice had died.

Despite that tiny fragment of a memory, he remained almost wilfully nonplussed for a few more seconds. Then he saw the way Meiji stared across the length of the plane at where Kolya was crouching. And then he looked again at Meiji in something like tired disbelief.

‘Don’t tell me…’

Meiji’s smile was feline and enigmatic and sanguine as ever, but also a touch more real than Klaus had ever seen in the past.

‘I suppose what I mean is,’ Meiji said slowly. ‘I've never had a reason to believe in the gods until now.’

Tired disbelief still reigned. Meiji and Kolya had only known each other, Klaus reasoned to no one in particular, for a matter of hours. Surely nothing could have happened between them already? He glowered at Kolya who approached with a flannel blanket and water and didn't catch his gaze.

But, at length, Klaus observed Meiji’s face once more – the smile that he reserved for Kolya when he took his seat nearby – and realised in a moment of astonishment that the happiest he had ever seen Meiji was at the tail end of three years of captivity and eight hours of trudging through wilderness.

He felt a strange pain in his chest. Something had made him think of Haruki, but he didn’t know what.

As he continued to glance between the two in front of him, his resentment of Kolya began to recede.

‘Well, I’m happy for you,’ he said to Meiji, aware that he sounded a touch more weary than he meant to.

But the smile Meiji gave him in response was sincere.

Kolya looked up and wondered what they were talking about.

* * *

Tachibana paced, much like he had on a similar day long ago.

Meiji was gone. He had disappeared from the winter residence as though he had simply been whisked off on the wind. There was nothing to show for it except, as his guards bemusedly reported, a sliding door that had been yanked clean off the rail and a detonation that seemed to be used as a diversion.

He was gravely regretting his latent fear of not having killed Meiji when he had the chance. He wondered if the bad luck that had followed in the wake of the Reizen assassinations had made him into something of a superstitious fool.

In desperation, he had asked for all defence bases across the nation to be on the lookout for an impending attack from within, one that was highly likely to be carried out by the _Hitobito_ in an effort to destabilise him.

Vague though it was, it put all bases on alert.

And half an hour later, a fighter jet training base in Shikoku reported that a patrol plane had radioed technical difficulties last night somewhere above Tachibana’s province.

His mouth dry, Tachibana put out another alert to all defence airbases and gave the order to shoot on sight.

* * *

Klaus was back at the controls, headset back on, watching dawn spread like a thin sheet over the land below. The sea was already far out of sight and they were nearing the base at Shikoku.

And he was thinking about how he had almost completed it. This final mission. Another final mission, he thought wryly. He would return Meiji to the Fifteenth, gather what few belongings he had and leave. The hollow feeling in him then was exacerbated by the sight of the world as they hovered tens of thousands of feet above it. It reminded him of the _Sagi_ and the nine months he had spent looking for Taki in all corners of the world.

He heard something that made him turn. Meiji had come to the narrow entrance of the cockpit and sat on the awkward waist-high divider, wrapped in the blanket that Kolya had found for him.

‘Klaus.’   
  
Klaus tilted his head to look at him in slight surprise. Meiji very rarely used his name.  
  
Meiji hesitated. ‘I only just learned about Taki.’

He saw Klaus’ jaw twitch as he turned to look back through the windshield.

‘I’m sorry,’ Meiji went on quietly. ‘No one should have to know that kind of pain.’

Klaus said nothing.

Meiji had spoken quietly enough that Ryoumei could pretend he hadn't heard.

Kolya heard from where he was sitting. It was the very first time he had given any thought to Klaus’ past.  
  
Meiji was silent for a few moments, trying to broach a new subject in the best way possible; to make Klaus divulge without realising it was intended in that way.  
  
‘This Haruki Yamamoto,’ he said carefully. ‘I’ve heard wonderful things from Kolya. Though how reliable the information is, coming from the commander’s doting bodyguard, I can’t be sure.’  
  
‘It’s all true,’ Klaus said simply.  
  
Meiji smiled to himself, his suspicions rising by a notch.  
  
‘From what I’ve gathered, you’re not particularly unbiased yourself.’  
  
‘I can vouch for Haruki too, Your Majesty,’ Ryoumei said, before Klaus could wonder exactly what Kolya had told Meiji. ‘I mean, if my opinion counts for anything, that is.’  
  
Meiji looked at him with interest. ‘How do you know the commander, Captain Fukushima?’  
  
Ryoumei opened his mouth before closing it again. ‘I’ve…known him since we were kids,’ he admitted.  
  
‘Bastions of objectivity, all three of you,’ Meiji said with a smile. ‘But I’ll happily take your word for it. I look forward to meeting him.’

Klaus was silent for another few seconds. Meiji watched him closely.

‘The two of you will know what to do next,’ Klaus said. ‘Along with Shoda. With all three of you heading the revolution, you’ll be back on the throne in no time.’

‘It sounds almost as though you aren’t returning with us,’ Meiji observed.

A small pause.

'I told Haruki I'd bring you back to the division.'

'And after that?'

Ryoumei frowned and shot Klaus a sideways glance.

‘I’m… considering leaving,’ Klaus said. ‘After we're done with –’

‘What, you’re planning to fuck off now?’ Ryoumei interjected suddenly. He flicked a glance at Meiji. ‘Sorry, Your Majesty.’ Then he turned back to Klaus. ‘Does Haruki know?’

Klaus grit his teeth, wondering how the hell he had landed in that conversation.

‘That’s not the –’

‘So he doesn’t know,’ Ryoumei deduced.

Klaus gave an angry sigh that crackled slightly painfully in Ryoumei’s headphones.

There was a long silence where they all, separately, appreciated the loudness of the plane's hum. Ryoumei listened to it while thinking about how dejected Haruki had looked the previous night as they waited near a parked jeep in the square.

‘It doesn’t matter,' Klaus said, managing to sound brusque and despondent at once. 'He won’t need me around after this. I’ve done all I –’

That was when Ryoumei, finally, reached the end of his patience.

‘He’s been in love with you for ten years!’

Klaus’ heart skipped several beats.

Meiji’s eyebrows lifted slightly and even Kolya looked up.

Sure that he’d misheard, Klaus turned to Ryoumei in shock.

‘What?’

‘He’s –’

A high screech on the panel before them drew Ryoumei’s attention, though the inertia of Klaus' shock was enough that it took him another crucial second to turn his head. When he saw the warning that was pulsing, red and angry, a cold chill ran up his spine.

A defence airbase below them had tried to hail them for some time and Ryoumei had sent the usual automatic communication signalling trouble with comms. With new orders from the emperor and very little choice, the base had trained their anti-aircraft weapons on the plane.

‘A missile’s locked on,’ he realised.

‘Shit,’ Ryoumei hissed, his heartbeat filling his ears.

‘Pitching left!’ Klaus called suddenly.

The plane did exactly that, just in time to avoid the slender, whistling, lightning-fast missile that had hurtled at them in only seconds.

Meiji lost his balance and was nearly flung across the plane when Kolya’s arm caught him around the chest and he was pulled back to the paratrooper seats.

‘Strap in!’ Klaus ordered over his shoulder.

Kolya complied at once. As the plane pitched and levelled, he gripped Meiji’s arm and looked at him reassuringly. But in reality he felt that same impotence that made him angry. For all his strength, there was nothing he could do to ensure that Meiji would be safe. Everything was riding on Klaus at the controls. He clenched his jaw and held on.  
  
‘We need to land,’ Klaus quickly realised.  
  
Ryoumei was thinking the same. The idea of having to duck and weave around another missile wasn’t appealing.  
  
‘We’re not close enough to Shikoku.’  
  
‘They’ll be waiting for us at Shikoku anyway,’ Klaus said grimly. ‘If they’re firing at us, they’ll have figured out it was your name and your flight. We can’t go back.’  
  
‘Then where do we land?’  
  
Klaus stared out at the dark mass of land beneath him, with cities and highways sparkling like beads on a tapestry. And then his eyes followed the line of a highway as it petered out. He glimpsed little settlements further afield with dimmer lights.  
  
‘Head southwest. A rural prefecture.’  
  
‘Which one?’  
  
‘Any that’s run by the _Hitobito_. I’ll land us on an open field. Hopefully the rebels find us before the army does,’ he added, which was a sentence he didn’t think he would ever utter in his life.  
  
Ryoumei left the controls to find a map. They decided on Soni which was a small rural area nearby that had fallen under rebel control months ago and never regained.  
  
They calculated their new bearing and Klaus turned the plane at a steep angle while steadily lowering it at the same time, to drop as quickly out of sight and radar detection as possible. Ryoumei held his breath.  
  
Meiji and even Kolya felt the harrowing sharpness of the descent. Kolya’s face remained impassive but his grip on Meiji's arm tightened like it did when they first fled the residence. He wondered, with almost scientific curiosity, about the possibility that if he wrapped his whole body around Meiji, he might be strong enough to protect him even from a plane crash.

* * *

He didn’t get the chance to test his hypothesis. Klaus’ quick thinking and masterful flying had landed them safely in an open field right in the heart of Soni. Ryoumei was reluctantly impressed. He wondered idly whether Klaus or Haruki was the better flyer.

The others remained on the plane as Klaus stepped out, hands raised, to reassure the alarmed townsfolk, some of whom were armed, that they were not a one-plane raid sent by the capital.  
  
All it took was for the highest ranking _Hitobito_ official in Soni to place a call to Shoda and suddenly a large truck came rumbling up the field towards them, driven by a cheerful widow who smoked and wore men’s clothes.  
  
The townsfolk watched, perplexed, as the tall blonde Saxon got into the back of the truck, along with three others; one of their own, a fearsome looking Eurotean, and someone who looked very much like the rightful Son of Heaven.   
  
They stared after the truck and had the sense they had been privy to an important moment in history, even if they couldn’t come close to understanding it.  
  
The plane that had fallen out of the sky into their midst was left in the open field.

* * *

_‘What could go wrong?_  I said to Haruki,’ Ryoumei recalled, leaning back against the corrugated iron side of the truck. ‘A mission with about three seconds of notice with the future of the goddamn country on the line. And now here we are in a truck that smells like a horse’s ass.’   
  
He then remembered, again, the company he was in.  
  
‘Pardon me, Your Majesty.’  
  
Meiji only smiled. He sat atop Kolya’s jacket, which Kolya had taken off again despite Meiji’s gentle protests.  
  
Klaus remained silent. The truck reminded him of the smell of Wolfsbane’s stable. The ground was strewn with slightly damp-looking hay and a smell of livestock that Klaus always found strangely comforting.

But his mind was now filled with something Ryoumei had blurted out before they dropped out of the sky. He looked at Ryoumei where he sat.

‘What you said before…’ he said, his voice strained. 'About Haruki…’

‘What, that he’s been in love with you for ten years?’ Ryoumei said easily, and little acidly.

He had had eight long hours on a plane with Klaus, most of it spent in complete silence, to ponder over what he had observed since he came to the division. The way Haruki and Klaus had acted around one another. The conspicuous nature of their silences when it came to what had happened with Kolya. Though the whole picture didn't come to Ryoumei, he knew enough, and he knew Haruki enough, to make some adroit conclusions.

Klaus frowned, feeling his head beginning to ache again. He tried to ignore it, as well as the way his heart had started beating louder.

‘That doesn’t make sense. I’ve been back in the east for less than a year.’

‘He fell for you back when he was a kid,’ Ryoumei said, sounding almost bored. ‘I figured it out when we were cadets. Then he finally admitted as much when I caught him with some guy in flight school. I think we were seventeen. The other guy seemed older, though,’ Ryoumei ruminated flippantly.

There was too much there for Klaus to absorb in one sitting. None of it sank in.

_Some guy._

‘I don’t –’

‘He’s slept with half the guys in the west trying to find you. Okay?’ Ryoumei sighed and slumped. ‘I’m so fucking _sick_ of sitting on this secret.’

Seconds ticked by loudly. Klaus still didn’t understand.

‘What do you mean he’s slept with –?’

Ryoumei clicked his tongue.

‘Don’t tell me you thought he was pure as snow. He’s a saint in some ways but definitely not in others.’ He stared at Klaus with a strange mixture of relish and irritation. ‘What, did you expect him to have waited around for a whole decade?’

‘I always thought –’ A furtive glance at the other side of the truck. ‘That it was just… Kolya…’

Kolya’s eyes flashed.

‘We never – sir and I never once –’ he began, but he didn’t know how to finish that sentence and preserve his master’s dignity.

‘Oh, good,’ Meiji said from beside him, his tone quiet and unobtrusive. ‘I was hoping for some clarification there.’

Kolya caught his eye and flushed very lightly.

Klaus’ heart still beat out an erratic rhythm. He recalled, buried somewhere in awful memories of when he had pressed Haruki against the wall of his shed, that Haruki had reluctantly told him it hadn’t been Kolya. But Klaus couldn’t remember much more. And now, according to Ryoumei…

Haruki had never been with Kolya. But he had been with another. Many others.

_What about you? Any takers?_

_No, I – there were a few in the west. But none of them… landed._

Klaus felt slightly numb.

‘So he’s… been with…’

By then, Ryoumei was exasperated at himself and Klaus and Haruki all in one hit.

‘Look, I’ve already said too much. In front of the Eurotean and His Royal Majesty, no less,’ he added, drawing another smile from Meiji. ‘You want to know who he’s been with, and how many, go ask him. I just thought I’d let you know that Haruki’s thought of nothing but you for a really fucking long time. So don’t jerk him around.’

In the pause, the numbness only grew. Klaus could feel Kolya’s glare without needing to look up.

Ryoumei turned and caught the look of shock on Klaus’ face. Pity crept into him then, paper-thin though it was.

‘It wasn’t _half_ the guys in the west,’ he conceded gruffly. ‘But it was definitely more than a few, from what I could tell.’

He then saw the new look Klaus gave him.

‘No, I wasn’t one of them,’ he said loudly and clearly, even more annoyed.

And then, for no reason at all, Ryoumei felt slighted over the fact that the suspicion had even crossed Klaus’ mind. He threw a glance at Kolya and Meiji and reflected on their strange, tangible intimacy over the past few hours.

‘You know, I don’t know how it happened that _I’m_ the fucking anomaly over here,’ he said, his tone shifting to one of self-righteousness. ‘I’m guessing I’m the only one in this goddamn truck who’ll ever get a woman pregnant.’

A small, damning silence fell.

Then Meiji began laughing softly.

Even Klaus’ lips twitched and he dropped his gaze.

‘Goddamn freak show,’ Ryoumei muttered under his breath, though he was smiling too and somewhat relieved at the emperor's reaction to his outburst.

But Klaus’ smile very quickly dissolved.

_He’s been in love with you for ten years._

Something throbbed and ached and roiled. He thought of how Haruki smiled every time Klaus came into the room. The way he had looked at Klaus on the day he arrived at the compound. The day he had turned to see Klaus in the wheat stalks. Fire-lit and moonlit memories and eyes that made him feel ten feet tall.

And then there was what he had done to Haruki only days ago. The way Haruki had looked at him then.

He ran a hand through his hair. He felt a kind of dizziness that no high-speed drops out of the sky had ever induced.

He didn’t understand how it was possible to feel such elation and sorrow and guilt in equal measure.

* * *

The silence in the office was oppressive.

Haruki had stared at every inch of it at some point over the past day. He had gotten barely any sleep the night before. His was the kind of constant, pulsing anxiety that Taki had felt each time his knight had left on a mission.

A mission that should have taken them six hours had now stretched into eighteen.

There were constant surges of anxiety that plateaued into light-headedness in between.

The first surge came when the sergeant who had driven them to the airbase in Shikoku had returned in an empty jeep, saying he had waited three hours longer than their estimated return time and there had been no sign of the patrol plane.

The second came when there was a direct order from headquarters and the capital for all bases to be on the lookout for a suspicious aircraft, and the order for all bases with ground-to-air strike capabilities to shoot it down on sight.

Third was when they heard on the transceiver that an aircraft had been shot at near the border of Tachibana’s province.

Hasebe’s assurances that the flight seemed to have evaded the attack didn’t do anything to calm his nerves. From all reports it had dropped out of sight and radar detection not long after that. Anything could have happened.

And long hours had passed since then.

He knew they wouldn’t radio in for help. The Fifteenth wasn’t to be tied to the search-and-rescue in any way, or Tachibana would come down on their heads. But suddenly Haruki didn’t care. He suddenly felt willing to forsake the whole division if it meant he could see Klaus again.

It was nearing evening when Haruki got word from the guards at the west exit.

The soldier reported in confusion that it was a truck driven by a woman who bore cargo for, ‘the light that will shine the way.’

A painful flare of hope surged straight to Haruki’s head as he recognised Shoda’s words. He told the guards to let the truck in at once and to direct it around the back of the main building. Then he and Hasebe rushed from the office.

Klaus opened the back of the truck and double-checked that they were out of sight before he swung the door open fully, revealing the cargo they had gone to great lengths to recover.

Before he could jump out of the truck, Haruki appeared around the corner. And before Klaus felt anything else, before the tangle of emotions found him again, he felt only a pure, concentrated surge of warmth. It was uncomplicated. It was inspired simply by the sight of him.

And Haruki, for his part, only then understood how overwhelming an emotion relief could be.

Klaus’ feet had only just touched the ground by the time Haruki reached him. Without a word, he pulled Klaus into an unexpected embrace, his arms about Klaus' neck and shoulders. Klaus was taken aback for a beat or two, heart pounding again. Then he held Haruki to him, grateful to the powers that be for allowing him those few seconds at least, no matter what else was lying in wait.

His eyes then followed Haruki as he went to Ryoumei and Kolya, relieved to see they were also unharmed. He heard the first exchange between Haruki and Meiji, who had been helped out of the truck by Kolya. He heard Haruki ask Kolya to take Meiji inside to one of the guest chambers, where he would promptly send a maid he trusted to attend to the emperor in case he needed anything. He heard Meiji graciously give his thanks. He heard Haruki thank the woman who had driven them for over six hours. He heard the woman’s cheerful, casual dismissal.

But he didn’t really hear any of it.

His ears were still ringing with what Ryoumei had said. And he remained there even after the others had left. He hovered there, where Haruki had let go of him, until Haruki came to him again, eyes wide and filled with an emotion that Klaus finally understood.

Haruki was saying something else, asking Klaus if he was sure he was alright, but Klaus didn’t let him finish. He pulled Haruki into a kiss that lasted long enough for him to make a decision.

Leaving could wait until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There really is a land-bridge stretching across a bay in the north of Japan. It’s called the Amanohashidate. I sat there for a few hours last April, it was quite pretty. And, having been there, I can report with confidence that none of what happened in this chapter could have happened in real life LOL. I guess for the story I made the land-bridge a lot wider so a plane might be able to land and take off on its edge, and I got rid of all surrounding towns to make it less implausible that they could have done it without being seen.
> 
> Also, as I was telling a commenter below, that's mostly it for the Kolya/Meiji arc (a bit more in the next chapter). Theirs is another saga I really want to delve into, but maybe as a side-story once I'm done with this story. I've been dying to throw them together for so long, hope you guys enjoyed them!


	61. Second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kolya and Meiji :)

It took a while before they ended up in the commander’s bedroom.

Until then, time passed in the same way that it did during those few minutes near the open back of the truck; those few minutes when sound seemed distant and motion was strangely fluid and Klaus observed it all with his focus entirely on Haruki.

That vivid focus endured for the next hour after Haruki called his colonels and officers to the general meeting room. All doors and windows were sealed shut and the nearest guards and patrols were sent out of earshot.

Klaus was still thinking of the way Haruki had pulled back from their kiss and how the relief in Haruki's gaze sparked something physical inside him. A rush of warm currents in a cold ocean. And he had nodded when Haruki, almost apologetically, said he had to call a meeting. The hand on Klaus' arm and chest, the slightly dazed look in his eye, all matched Klaus' thoughts at that moment, or lack thereof.

And now he stood near the door, instead of at his regular seat.

Kolya came in after the meeting had already begun. Klaus caught his eye before he went to the head of the table to stand behind Haruki.

Haruki, who, without much preamble, told all of his officers about Shoda, Meiji and the fact that he was about to stage a mutiny that could potentially result in a coup with enough support from other military bases.

Klaus’ heart again picked up its pace as he looked at Haruki. Haruki, who wasn’t even looking at him but suddenly whose being seemed for him, for Klaus, in entirety. He was transfixed by Haruki's gaze, once again focused, once again devoted to the task at hand. The hair that curled over his forehead, despite the rest of it being brushed back, all of it glimmering beneath the lights. The firm, gentle voice that went beyond his years and brought silence to the table in its wake. The mouth that Klaus had kissed countless times, the body that had been his countless times. All of him was Klaus’. All of him, as Klaus now knew, had always been Klaus’.

He suddenly imagined going to the commander and kissing him again, in front of every single one of his officers. As though for confirmation. For something. Something that would help him make sense of why he still hadn’t been able to shake that feeling. A feeling that was equal parts elation and sorrow and guilt and took over his whole body.

When Haruki caught his eye, he felt it again in a concentrated spike. He was sure, for a moment, that he had given himself away. But the commander's expression didn’t change, and Klaus saw he was looking to him simply for assurance. Klaus managed a nod. The subtle warmth and gratitude that crossed Haruki’s features were enough, now, to feel like distant tinkling lights. And when Haruki did something as simple as turn his gaze away again, Klaus felt a hollow pang.

Trying to sweep all of those various shades of emotion aside, shades so real they reminded him of the way Taki had described the workings of Hans’ gift, Klaus turned his own attention to the room.

He expected the disbelieving silence.

And the raucous dialogue that came immediately after. Officers stood and gestured, others sat in silence, looking pale. Others seemed almost relieved. Suguri sat halfway down the table, his suspicions having come to a head. There was a strange mix of emotions on his face.

And Klaus felt his head start to pound. _All you did was devour him._

'The entire division will be at risk.'

'Not a single man will be spared, mark my words! If it's true that commanders stand to executed summarily just for insubordination, we can't expect any kind of mercy for –'

‘This is precisely the kind of unified front we need to present to the capital. The revolution and the army. Even if we fail, we'll at least have let the country and the world know –'

'Are you aware of what failing will mean? It will mean the death or incarceration of everyone in the division. Not to mention their families!'

'All of our families have been at risk from the moment the emperor took the throne –'

‘That’s hardly in the same league as what we’re proposing now.’

Haruki listened, standing up at the head of the table, leaning forwards slightly on his hands.

Ryoumei leaned back in a seat not far from him, again looking like he wanted a cigarette. His mind was on Keiko and Sakura but his expression had settled into his typical, slightly irritated apathy. He simply wished for the obligatory debating to die down so they could figure out exactly whom they could rely on and exactly how they would go about bringing down the emperor.

'As far as I can see,’ remarked Tansho, one of the colonels who had taken Aizawa’s place as Grand Chamberlain. ‘It doesn’t even to be an issue of “if” but of “when”. Our commander has already made a decision.’

‘One that breaks the chain of command,’ Haruki reminded him. ‘Military protocol no longer applies, not by default anyway. You aren't beholden to me as your commanding officer. In fact, it's entirely your decision whether you follow me or not. I will be making the same announcement to the division as a whole.’

Another silence ensued as each man digested the gravity of the news.

‘If anyone here doesn’t want to be a part of this, you are still free to turn back now. You may even report me to the capital. In fact, it’s within your power to arrest me this very minute for treason.’

Some nervous glances were flicked at Klaus and Kolya. Arresting the commander was one option no one in their right mind would attempt.

‘But if you are with me,’ Haruki went on, firmly and clearly. ‘And with the _Hitobito,_ I need you to commit fully and know exactly what it means to commit fully. I need to know, now, which of you I can count on.’

In the next few minutes, Klaus was vindicated – at least as far as his argument with Hasebe was concerned. Every officer there, despite the reservations that some had expressed quite vocally, was with Haruki. They had only to think of their families and the state of their country; one in which duty and honour were at odds and one which had weighed on their minds almost as much as it did the young commander.

Even Suguri, despite his worries and conservatism and fear of what this would mean for their division and their nation, sensed something that went deeper than superficial military code. Something that went as deep as the code of honour that had been instilled into him, into his marrow, since he was old enough to understand what it meant to serve one’s country.

Once that deep sliver of an abyss had been crossed, once each colonel and officer saw the smile that swiftly crossed the commander’s face in response, they knew intuitively that theirs was the right decision.

And the topic turned to more technical matters.

It was news to Klaus that Shoda had made contact with Haruki earlier that day.

‘Shoda is still in charge of the revolution, but he wishes to defer to me if we gather enough military support,’ Haruki said, and Klaus was struck by how he didn’t even seem to flinch at the thought. It reminded him of how far the kid had come since he turned up at the cottage unsure about taking command. ‘But he is more aware of this new landscape than I am, and I'm inclined to follow his advice. He believes we need to declare our position to the capital and strike soon, as soon as we have the rightful emperor, which we do now.’

‘We are only a third of our strength, sir,’ one of the majors pointed out. ‘Most of our men and resources are at the Western Front. We must ask headquarters to return some or all of them, under some pretext.’

Haruki hesitated for the first time. ‘In light of what happened with Nakamori, I doubt Tachibana will allow any more men to return to the Fifteenth.'

'But we have been in touch with Colonel Motohara on the Western Front,’ Hasebe said. ‘He’s with us. He’s sending back who he can under the capital’s radar. A tank unit and a few infantry units. It’ll add a few hundred to our numbers.’

The men looked uncomfortable. Only a few hundred more against a dangerous new enemy.

‘The commander of the Fourteenth is also with us,’ Haruki said. ‘And Tachibana doesn’t suspect him of anything. His petition to bring back his men from the Western Front has been approved. They will be back to their full strength in a little over a week’s time.’

‘That’s when we should strike,’ the major said.

‘At the very least we should wait for the Fourteenth to have all of their troops and tanks,’ one of the colonels agreed.

Haruki was silent for a moment. ‘We should strike now.’

A short, surprised silence followed.

‘Haruki-sama –’

‘We have waited long enough, and the longer we wait, the more time Tachibana will have to weed out dissent among the commanders who are about to revolt. Shoda believes the same thing. Even with a third of our capacity, we can put up a strong front. We have just under half the nearby regiments on our side as well as all of the auxiliary units –’

‘According to Shoda,’ Hasebe gingerly and gruffly interrupted.

‘With them,’ Haruki went on nevertheless, eyes sharp and focused, ‘and with the civilian militia in the _Hitobito_ , there’s just enough of us to take the first step.’

‘Sir,’ Hasebe said, again looking uncomfortable, as though they had debated this for the past day while awaiting Klaus, Kolya and Ryoumei’s return. ‘I have to insist that we wait for more manpower.’

Several of the colonels expressed their assent, watching the commander a little nervously. The commander’s recklessness in the past had always been geared towards inaction rather than action. Suguri bristled where he sat.

Klaus was also surprised, as was the commander himself.

Haruki tried to understand his own welling restlessness. His impatience to act. All he knew was that the weight of his decision after Shoda arrived on his doorstep, compounded by the anxiety of the past eighteen hours waiting for Klaus to come back to him, had all been channelled into a specific and powerful need to act, and act now. He needed to come out from beneath the shadow of the past few years.

‘Sir, this is the only chance we’ll have,’ Tansho warned. ‘Once we declare war against the capital, Tachibana will use whomever remains loyal to him and come down on us with a vengeance.’

‘I understand your reservations,’ Haruki said, pushing off his hands to stand up straight. ‘But this is a new landscape and it could change at any moment. For now, at least, we have the element of surprise. If we lose that, there’s no telling how the capital will respond.’

A small smile twitched Klaus’ lips when he came to the same realisation that Haruki did. The kid had finally found an enemy he knew, without doubt, was his enemy. And it brought out his true colours as commander. Colours that were almost familiar. And ones that Taki himself had foreseen.

_He has a strong sense of justice. Almost too strong._

‘We should wait, Commander,’ Klaus said, deciding, finally, to break his silence.

Haruki looked at him and his expression faltered only slightly, but in a way that Suguri noticed.

‘Tansho’s right,’ Klaus continued. ‘So’s Hasebe, though I hate to admit it. We’ve come this far and we're in danger lose it all if we move too quickly.’

‘But the longer we wait –’ Haruki tried.

‘The capital cottoning on to all of this is a risk we’ll have to take. Better that risk than the one where we get our asses handed to us before we even properly start.’

The officers were relieved when Haruki seemed uncertain for the first time. After a long pause, he conceded the point and agreed to wait until they received more word from Shoda about the exact strength of their forces. But, for the moment, the coup was on hold.

As they discussed other matters, Klaus fell back into silence. He had said enough.

He had done enough.

_You killed your rose. Just like you’ll kill your pup._

Haruki left the general meeting room still buzzing with the words of his officers, the murmurs and the outspoken remarks, the very energy of it all. He was still talking about it, with Hasebe, with Tansho. Klaus hadn't said anything since his quiet few lines but Haruki felt his presence just as strongly as the others as they crossed the compound.

'I know it's safer to wait,' Haruki said, his gaze intent on the tips of his shoes as he walked up the carpeted hallway, feeling as though he could still see maps and offensive strategy scrawled just beyond his toes. 'And I know that taking Shoda’s word for it seems rash but –'

He was cut off abruptly by Klaus taking his elbow, pulling him back a step and catching his mouth in a kiss.

His insides flipped horribly during the confused moment where he thought Hasebe and Tansho were still there. Then he realised that they had already reached the hallway just outside his bedroom and that Klaus was alone with him. Not even Kolya was there.

And so Haruki succumbed, the energy from seconds ago transforming into something else completely, something as familiar as it was nerve-wracking, as Klaus pressed him against the wall first, hands fumbling at the door handle, and then against the wall on other side of the door, in a room where the curtains were still open and the light of dusk fading from the walls and floor.

The last time Klaus had touched him...

For the past two days, Haruki had managed to successfully condemn the memory to a world bordering on fantasy. A place where it didn't really happen. And so now, when Klaus held him against the wall, his tongue and lips hot against Haruki's and heavy hands palming his jaw and neck, he was aghast to discover how it flooded him again.

_Go on, spread your legs for me. You’re always doing it. You’re always gagging for it._

That was all he meant to Klaus. A part of him had known that, but it hadn't been enough to stop an insidious little barb from twisting into him.

And then, of course, there was what had followed. Klaus hurting him; hurting him despite the hurt, despite knowing that it would hurt. Wanting it to hurt. The fear, the disbelief. And the very real pain.

But when Klaus pulled his mouth away to look at him, his momentary fear went away. That part, at least, hadn't been Klaus. The fierce eyes watching him then, the hands in his hair, the comforting golden scent of him. That was Klaus.

And even if nothing Haruki did would ever measure up to the former commander, whether out there in battle or in that room with Klaus, it was enough to have come that close.

Klaus tried to rein it in. He wanted to hold Haruki’s wrists against the wall on either side of his head. Instead, he forced himself to keep them on Haruki’s face and the slim waist that was cinched in by the belt around his jacket. He undid the buttons of Haruki’s jacket as gently as he could. He pulled back often just to feel his pulse surge at the look in Haruki’s eyes. He kissed the side of Haruki’s neck and felt him arch up and breathe deeper.

Klaus sank into his scent. The cologne was faint, like Haruki hadn't used it for a while, lingering somewhere on his collar. There was the natural musk of him, faintly sweet and bringing about that strange synaesthetic feeling of an afternoon in a bedroom flooded in sunlight. The pounding in Klaus' head receded the longer he was there, the longer he let that feeling seep into him again and let Haruki grip the front of his coat and loop his hands around Klaus’ neck.

He felt light and heavy at once over what Ryoumei had said – over the thought that it was true and that the kid’s feelings for him had run so deep and for so unthinkably long. He felt it swell inside him, growing and roiling in colours that were yellow and white and threatening to make him float and leave the ground. At the same time, it made him want to hang his head against Haruki's neck and ask why, why he deserved such a thing and how anyone could have felt anything remotely like that for him for so long. His mind swam when he thought of it. His mind swam in Haruki’s scent and the feeling of his slender hands on him. And all the while, he felt caught between those two conflicting emotions.

He was always caught somewhere between worlds, even though he was closer, now, to knowing what he longed for.

And, just as he was on the brink of seeing it more clearly, there was a brisk rap on the door to their left.

It was a familiar sound, the wooden sound of reality, and it managed to bring them both to Earth. Haruki pulled away and tried to catch his breath.

‘Yes?’ he called.

‘Sir,’ came Kolya’s voice. ‘May I speak with you?’

Klaus made a quiet sound of frustration. Haruki looked at him and then back at the door, fighting to think clearly.

‘Can it wait?’ Haruki said, trying and failing not to sound breathless.

‘No, sir,’ Kolya said, after a small pause. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Haruki was surprised. He had never heard that tone in Kolya’s voice before, nor had Kolya ever made anything close to a demand. Haruki was suddenly worried.

Klaus rested his forehead on the wall beside Haruki’s head. Haruki angled his face to look at him. His gaze was hard to read in that moment. It made Haruki nervous.

It was that look of slight anxiety in Haruki’s eyes that made Klaus step back and give him just enough room to slip away.

* * *

As he waited, he lit a cigarette by the large window on the far side of the room.

The world was deceptively quiet outside. There was only the gentle hint of rain in the air. It was though there wasn’t a change in tide coming that would change the future of the nation. He was a creature of war, and he knew it. He knew he should stay and help. But he also knew the longer he stayed, the more mired he would be. The harder it would be for him to preserve his love and his loyalty to his old master.

And the worse it would be for Haruki, whom he would only continue to hurt.

Ten years.

He knew that he was breaking his own promise to himself that he would leave quietly, without touching Haruki again. But it was as though, after he found out, he couldn't help himself. He wanted to bask in it just a little longer. To see if it was real, if he could feel it. To know what it was like.

The word ‘love’ rolled about in his head like a little golden ball, knocking into the corners. Even in Ryoumei’s casual drawl, it had left an impact.

He still couldn’t fathom it. He tried to think of all the times, in that past year, that he had pushed Haruki away. All the times he would have been waiting, just like Klaus had waited for Taki. All the times Haruki had felt as though he was wading through cold currents.

When the door opened and Haruki stepped back in, Klaus was still by the window, immersed in the memory of Haruki smiling as he described a lucky break on his test flight.

For Haruki, the moment when he stepped back into the room was a strange one. He was still trying to absorb what had happened with Kolya outside. And he had then walked in to see Klaus smoking by the window, his gaze serene in the dim light, cigarette tip glowing at his fingers. It took Haruki back to the night when he was fourteen, sharing a room with Klaus in an inn, and he had rolled over to see Klaus doing the same. Heart and mind on Taki. His body longing to catch up.

Haruki was dismayed to feel, in the pit of his stomach, the first very real stab of jealousy towards Taki. Taki, who had always had Klaus' love so freely and easily.

Klaus looked around and was surprised to see the look on Haruki's face.

'What happened?'

Haruki subdued it, both the jealousy and his disgust at himself for feeling something like that for someone who was no longer alive. He focused on the bizarre conversation he had just had outside.

‘Kolya,’ he said, aware that he still sounded bemused, ‘just asked to be released. From me.’

* * *

While Klaus waited by the window in the bedroom thinking about how much he was about to hurt Haruki, Kolya was outside in the hallway worrying the same, even as he stood before him.

Haruki stared at him, somewhat dumbstruck. The pained, imploring look on Kolya's face and the fists being held resolutely by his sides all reminded him of the night he had spoken to him for the first time in a Eurotean hospital room.

There was no doubt in Haruki’s mind that he would let Kolya do anything he wanted. But the question still remained.

‘Why?’

Kolya hesitated, not for a lack of will but a lack of words. He wondered where he should begin.

When he and Meiji first entered the guest chamber, Meiji recognised it from his previous stay at the compound; a stay during which he had first met Klaus. There was a large bed and writing desk, and a set of double doors leading to a small inner courtyard where flowers grew in neat rows.

‘You will be safe here,’ said Kolya.

Meiji turned to him.

‘There will be guards just outside your door, and around the building.’

He reflected about how none of the guards were yet to know whom they were protecting, but Kolya would impress on them the singular importance of their job.

‘Thank you,’ Meiji said.

And Kolya, as though to shake himself free from Meiji’s gaze, tried to remember where he had to be.

‘The commander will have called a meeting. I should –’

‘Of course.’

Meiji was left alone in the room. He decided he would spare some time later to thank Kolya properly for everything he had done. And, if his words were dexterous enough, to thank him for an encounter that had meant so much to him, and had revealed even more, even if it wasn't meant to last.

After the meeting, after Kolya spent a few minutes at his post outside the door to Haruki's building, he was approached by one of the guards assigned to Meiji's security. He was told that the guest in the east wing had asked to speak to him whenever was most convenient.

And Kolya, heart thudding, had taken a few steps down the stairs before he paused. He put a hand in his pocket and felt the small elastic band that was still there. He had pictured Meiji's hair falling about his shoulders when he guiltily made the decision to pocket the small tie. He tried to remember if the image of Meiji he had seen his whole life had had hair like that. Surely not. Surely he would have remembered something so striking; something which only heightened that vaguely elven beauty.

And yet, Kolya was sure. He was finally sure for the first time in his life. And he had only one regret.

He took his hand out of his pocket and it curled into its usual fist by his side. Then he turned and went into Haruki's building.

‘I think it has always been Meiji-sama,’ Kolya said, finally, holding Haruki’s gaze, borrowing words that Haruki himself had said. ‘I think even following you here was something I was meant to do, for him. Ever since I was young... I’m sorry, sir, I'm not very good at explaining...’

Haruki blinked and tried to process.

‘I told you my life would be yours,’ Kolya went on, stiff and remorseful. ‘I know I will be breaking that vow and –’

‘You didn’t make that vow,’ Haruki interrupted quietly. ‘You never said your life was mine. I wouldn’t have let you make a promise like that.’

Kolya faltered. He may not have said it, but it was what he had intended.

‘What you said was that you felt indebted to me, for what happened that day in Eurote,’ Haruki continued. ‘And as far as I'm concerned, you’ve repaid that debt, time and time again. You don’t owe me anything.’

Kolya didn’t think that there would be a moment that superseded his master’s kindness than that day in the hospital room, but it hit him with full force again.

He couldn't think of what else to do but thank him, again berating himself for his stiffness.

And then he remembered. ‘I will still join the fight until the war is over. I will go to Meiji-sama after I have fought for you.’

Haruki looked at him for a few moments. What he understood, he understood only because he had seen Klaus and Taki together.

‘You can still join the fight, but when you do, you should fight for Meiji-sama. There's no reason for you to wait.’

Kolya’s confusion was met with Haruki's smile.

‘Go now,’ his former master gently urged him.

* * *

Kolya showered and changed. He put on his cleanest, crispest uniform. For a ridiculous moment, his eyes even travelled to the three suits hanging on the far side of his wardrobe which Ambassador Feulner had tailor-made for him. He checked his reflection several times over, feeling more nervous than he’d ever been. He realised he would much rather be falling out of a plane.

Meiji was sitting in the courtyard and didn’t hear Kolya knocking. So Kolya walked through the huge room and approached the glass-fronted doors. He pushed them open.

A soft, mysterious gaze turned to him. Meiji rose slowly from the stone bench where he was sitting. He was in fresh robes and seemed to have washed his hair. When Kolya approached, he noticed the new glow on the emperor’s flawless alabaster skin. A bewitching smell rose from the hair that he had gathered over one shoulder. It made it difficult for Kolya to focus.

Earlier, Meiji had been thinking about how his hair had barely reached past his ears on the day Sotaro left on horseback for a war that would take his life. He then thought about the day, much later, when Taki Reizen had come to him and offered him the throne. He remembered how he had accepted after much reluctance, thinking only that he might be able to do something as emperor so others wouldn’t have to suffer like he and Sotaro suffered.

That was when Kolya stepped into the courtyard.

‘The reason I asked you to come,’ Meiji began, who in turn felt strangely nervous as he stood before Kolya, ‘was so I could thank you properly for everything. I owe you a great debt, as I’ve already said.’

Kolya dropped his gaze to the floor and back, trying to find the politest way to refute him. But when their eyes met again, they were both thinking about a dusty warehouse floor and the light of a crackling, dying fire.

‘And I wanted to apologise if… anything that happened compromised any of your loyalties. I know by now not to come between a man and his master.’

Kolya’s reply was yet again stunted, this time by his own sudden curiosity.

Meiji saw his inquiring look. A smile played on his lips. ‘I once tried to threaten Taki to give up Klaus so he would become my knight and the permanent head of my Imperial Guard.’ A position that continues to be open, Meiji reflected with an internalised sigh. ‘It was a ruse, mostly,’ he added.

On cue, Kolya experienced the strongest surge of jealousy he had felt to date.

‘In any case, despite your being bound to Haruki, I hope you don’t forget that you have my gratitude and my –’

'I have just asked to be released of my duty to Commander Yamamoto.'

Kolya felt guilty and strangely pleased at the look of genuine surprise that crossed Meiji’s normally serene features.

Meiji’s response, and the question that followed, were remarkably similar to Haruki’s.

And Kolya tried, in in his broken way, to explain, just as he had done with Haruki. Again, he knew he had fallen short.

He used the same words and Meiji's expression changed as he spoke. There were numerous pauses in his monologue and he stared at the floor as often as he stared at Meiji himself.

‘I thought it was him,’ he continued, after yet another pause, but longing to barrel his way through, even if it was all so that Meiji would laugh in that soft way of his and turn him away. ‘But I was never sure. And now I know. I – it was always you. I knew it when I saw you.’

Once again, words fled Meiji's mind in the wake of the simple ones uttered by Kolya. He felt the moment slipping out of the veneer of normality he had tried to create. There was so much of Sotaro in so many of Kolya's movements, if not his words, and it was as though reason no longer applied. It was as though it made perfect sense for Kolya to give himself to Meiji like that.

'If you will have me,' Kolya finished, wondering if the heat that rose to his face was visible.

'Kolya,' Meiji said finally, surprised to hear the strange tone in his own voice. A waver, a vulnerability, he hadn't heard since his youth. 'I can't ask such a thing of you. Not when –'

 _'I_ am asking you,' Kolya clarified. He then thought of something Meiji had said earlier. He wondered if he could be so bold. 'If – if you really feel you are indebted to me, then this is what I ask of you. In return.'

Meiji managed a smile, though it was only to mask a reaction that was far less composed. 'It hardly seems like a fair trade for you.'

The emotions Meiji was holding back threatened to spill over again when his words, inane though they were, actually inspired the faintest and most self-conscious of smiles from Kolya, whom Meiji didn't recall having smiled once since they met.

And so, in a small private courtyard outside one of the guest chambers of the Reizen winter residence, without pageant, without grandeur, with only rows of flowers for witnesses, Meiji touched the centre of Kolya’s hand with his own bare hand, in place of a bow or katana. His touch lingered as he made Kolya repeat the simple vows that bound them to one another.

Kolya had never knelt before anyone in his life. The humility of it, the gravity of the gesture and his promise, felt so fitting that it was as though someone had envisioned it long ago, to the last detail, to the gentle rustling of white roses beyond the hem of Meiji's robes, and he was lucky enough to be living it. He closed his hand around Meiji's and kissed the back of it. He then turned it around and kissed his palm. And then he was standing and holding Meiji against him, his hand once again in Meiji's hair, his mouth moving from Meiji's lips to his neck.

And it wasn't until they were in the large bed between soft white sheets, with the echoes of moans and gasps fading around them, that Meiji finally asked. What Kolya had meant the night before when he said he knew Meiji's face. What exactly it was that made him so sure he had found what he had been searching for.

Still lost in the scent of Meiji's hair, his fingertips feeling out the soft skin of his waist, Kolya needed a moment to gather his thoughts. To relay a vision he hadn't spoken of since he was six years old.

'It was never clear,' he admitted. 'It's like a dream. It goes away when I try to focus.'

Meiji heard the rumble of his voice through his chest. He reached up to draw his hand over the taut muscles beneath Kolya's collarbone.

'I remember being on horseback. And leaning down to someone who was standing beside it.' He closed his eyes and tried to paint it again on his eyelids. 'The only thing I know for sure is what I said.'

With Meiji's head resting beneath his chin, his face out of sight, Kolya didn't know that Meiji's eyes were welling. Breath held, Meiji asked Kolya what it was that he had said.

_'I'll come back, Young Master.'_

And that was when Meiji was finally able to shed the tears that he had held back since he was seventeen. He curled into Kolya and his chest heaved with the weight of his sobs.

Considerably alarmed, Kolya could only blink and wait, holding Meiji's head against his chest.

* * *

Klaus stayed by the window and put his cigarette out on his boot heel as Haruki finished telling him what Kolya had said. He then raised his eyebrows in annoyance and rubbed his forehead.

‘I really hate that guy. He’s known Meiji-sama for less than a day and suddenly he gets to be emperor’s knight.’ He then managed a thin smile. ‘At least Meiji-sama offered me the job first. That’s something I’ll lord over Kolya until the end of time.’

He then glanced up to see Haruki leaning back against the footboard of the bed, looking vaguely upset. Despite everything he knew, seeing that was enough for Klaus to experience a kind of stale jealousy.

‘You okay?’

Haruki nodded. ‘I’m just surprised.’

‘You’re not alone there.’

As he moved off the wall beside the window he told Haruki, briefly, of the even briefer conversation he’d had with Meiji on the plane.

Haruki was lost in the idea. The strength of Kolya’s words. His certainty, and presumably Meiji’s certainty. How that must feel, that sense of a bond that was ordained and pre-ordained. A bond that Klaus had, and then lost, with Taki. A world meant for princes and their knights.

He took a short breath.

‘I always felt guilty about the fact that he gave himself to me. And how much he sacrificed for me. I’m glad if I somehow helped him find Meiji-sama.’ A small pause wherein that particular feeling grew and strengthened. He smiled. ‘I'm happy for him.’

Klaus smiled wanly when he realised that was also what he had said to Meiji.

And then he was done thinking about anyone else. He reached Haruki, took his chin gently in his hand and tilted his face up. There were only so many hours left until morning and Klaus intended to stretch out each one. Haruki rose off the footboard to meet his lips and Klaus managed to be slightly surprised, again, over the simplest of his gestures. The fact that Haruki rose into him, pulled him closer, welcomed his tongue and his hands without any restraint.

Ten years…

* * *

Mostly due to Haruki’s half-hearted protests, made out of concern for how he might smell on his stale clothes, that they were in the en suite, vapour clouds fogging up the mirror and translucent shower curtain and Klaus’ hair, which Haruki had never before seen wet, turning a darker shade under the falling water.

Haruki felt dazed as he stood before Klaus in the ethereal light. His tanned skin seemed to shine in the haze, his broad shoulders and chest huge and looming; comforting at the same time as intimidating. He let his hands run over the solid muscles of Klaus’ biceps which tensed and flexed when Klaus pulled him closer.

His stomach roiled with guilt when he saw how patent the marks on Klaus’ face were – the purple bruise on his jaw, the few cuts across his broad lips.

Klaus felt Haruki’s fingertips at his mouth, with a tenderness he assumed owed to the lingering evidence of what Kolya had done.

He palmed Haruki’s side and back, trailing soft soap suds, absorbing the warmth of his skin and muscles. The feel of his body alone was somehow soothing. The water drops fell on him with none of the same pain he had felt before; not on his head, that was still addled by the shell blast, nor on the cuts and bruises on his face. He felt only a rare, gentle peace. He slipped both hands beyond to gently knead his ass.

Haruki rested his cheek against Klaus’ shoulder and felt heat rise to his face.

That warmth of appraisal, the slow, heavy touch, was something Haruki was used to, but something he only expected after their hunger had been sated. Never like this, where the need was still at the forefront of both of their minds, surely, and yet where Klaus did almost nothing to pursue it.

Klaus gently turned him around and traced the muscles of his back again, softening his touch over the glossy ripples of Haruki’s burn scars. As it often happened, he couldn’t help but compare him to Taki. Taki, whose skin had always been pearly and pure and unmarked and Klaus’ alone. Haruki, who had been marked before him. Taken by others before Klaus.

The jealousy wasn’t as concentrated as he thought it would be; the idea of Haruki gasping and moaning beneath a string of faceless men. He wondered why that was.

 _Trying to find you,_ Ryoumei had said.

Klaus had only an inkling of what that might mean, but it was enough for him to feel that strange combination of light and heavy again. He kissed the skin of Haruki’s shoulder and his hands kept trailing over Haruki’s body gently.

Though Haruki suspected that Klaus was simply trying to repent, again, for what had happened, it made him feel distinctly self-conscious. He didn’t like the feeling of Klaus treating him like he was made of glass. He longed for Klaus to devour him like he used to.

And yet, as Klaus’ hands wandered to the backs of his thighs and slid further and further up, he realised something. His body sent up little warning flares. He braced himself to say it, almost afraid of what it would dredge up if he was to mention it.

‘Uh… Klaus, I’m –’ He heard the almost startling echo of his words in the small space of the bathroom. ‘I haven’t… I mean, it’s still –’

Torn. Hurt. Painful.

None of the words sounded right. They were weak and cold and dramatic all at once and Haruki couldn’t bring himself to say any of them.

But it was more than enough to inspire a familiar upswell of guilt and self-loathing. With immense effort, Klaus battened it down before moving his hands away. He turned Haruki back to face him and kissed him again, deeply, holding his jaw, tilting his face, delving further into his mouth. He finally moved his hand to Haruki’s cock, which twitched very slightly as though surprised and relieved at his touch.

Surprise and relief was precisely what Haruki felt. His breathing grew more laboured as Klaus closed his hand fully around his dick, moving it down the shaft and all the way back up.

Before he could reach down and return the favour, Klaus abruptly knelt before him on the shower floor and took Haruki’s cock into his mouth.

Haruki’s startled moan glanced sharply off the walls and lingered in the air, even as his fingers clenched Klaus’ wet hair and water cascaded over them both. He felt all of his senses concentrate on the intense heat of Klaus’ mouth, which swallowed him down to the base and back with a gentle but ruthless force. He almost lost his footing.

Klaus then moved him back with a guiding hand on his lower back until Haruki was half-sitting against the edge of the tub.

‘Hold onto me,’ Klaus ordered simply before he dived back onto Haruki’s cock.

Gasping for breath, his moans emerging rough and ragged, Haruki curled over his shoulders and saw the white marks his fingers left on the muscles of Klaus’ back as he held on and felt his mind slowly abandon him.

‘Ugh… Klaus. Mmmh…’

Klaus’ tongue and lips worked with a devious rhythm and Haruki felt as though his body from the waist down was melting before Klaus, to be drained away with the water. His toes slipped on the wet tiles and only his grip on Klaus’ back kept him upright.

And then suddenly Klaus pulled him forwards and stood up, in one swift move wrapping his legs around Klaus’ waist. Water splashed everywhere as Klaus left the shower, with an absent, impatient hand remembering in time to turn off the faucets. Klaus’ sheer strength and his own sudden weightlessness surprised Haruki in equal measure. It was as though Klaus didn’t need to spare even a moment's thought about lifting Haruki’s entire body.

Wet and still entwined, they fell onto the bedspread where Haruki felt the blankets beneath his back become soaked through. And Klaus once more crouched low over Haruki’s hips, this time spreading Haruki’s legs wide and over his shoulders, before he resumed where he left off.

_‘Ah!’_

Haruki writhed, his hair dragging wetly across the bed, drops from Klaus’ golden fringe falling onto his stomach each time he lowered his head. The heat intensified throughout Haruki's body without his control, like he was nothing more than an instrument in Klaus’ hands. He tried to summon an adequate warning.

‘Oh, shit… I’m coming… Klaus!’

But it didn’t look like Klaus had any intention of pulling off. Back arched, with one hand in Klaus’ hair and the other above him on the bed, Haruki gasped and came into Klaus’ mouth.

Klaus swallowed all of him and lifted up in time to see the way Haruki was spread before him, legs in the air and one hand reaching down to Klaus' face. And when Haruki stared at him, mouth open and eyes imploring, Klaus felt strangely like he had been the one who had just come.

* * *

Pleasure still coursed through Haruki, indistinguishable from the warm palms that ran up the full length of his body, from his ankles and legs all the way up his torso and neck. Klaus’ mouth found his in the haze of climax and Haruki clung to him.

By the time Klaus rolled off, Haruki had regained some of his senses; enough to reach over and touch Klaus in turn. He had felt Klaus’ stiffness against his thigh, and he could see it now, when he focused.

But Klaus pushed his hand away.

Haruki lay still and breathed hard. He tried to keep his eyes on Klaus who lay with a hand over his forehead, like he had done once, in that same place, on an afternoon that was brighter and more carefree.

Rain gurgled in the gutters beyond the window and tapped gently on the windowpane. The blankets were still slightly wet beneath them.

Again, it was a simple dismissal. A simple refusal. And Haruki knew, again, that it came from Klaus’ self-punishment. But it landed in a familiar place. It brought everything to the fore again. How far away Klaus still was. How he would never measure up to the commander who came before, no matter how hard he tried. And he had done his best.

Regardless, he wished he could understand. He longed for Klaus to talk to him about whatever was making him look so distant, even as he lay half an arm’s length away.

‘Klaus,’ he said tentatively, but with his mind made up about what he would say. He wondered if it was something he ought to have said a month ago when it all started.

Klaus looked at him.

‘If it's too hard for you to keep doing this… because of Taki-sama…’

It was the first time Haruki had brought up Taki's name like that. And Klaus was surprised to find that it didn't hurt him to hear it.

Haruki swallowed anxiously but his voice, when he went on, was still mellow. Reasoned.

‘We don’t – we can stop. Doing this, I mean. I don't want you to be in any more pain because of me.’

He stared at the bruise on Klaus’ jaw. Then he took a breath, on the point of saying more. On the point of saying that it meant enough to him that Klaus was there at all, beside him for the final fight. But he felt like he had already bared just enough – just shy of giving himself away fully.

He didn't expect Klaus to suddenly look at him the way he did.

And he didn't know Klaus was thinking of the day a young cadet stood up for him in front of his friends, in a time before Haruki had ever even met him. In a time where everyone, including his master, seemed to have turned their back on him. Even now, and since the beginning, Haruki was looking out for him.

_He's thought of nothing but you for a really fucking long time._

And Haruki definitely didn't expect for Klaus to reach over the bed, slide a hand beneath Haruki and pull him in against Klaus’ chest. Though his hold was gentle, his arms enveloped Haruki completely.

It was a warmth and closeness that Haruki hadn't known before and one that left him slightly wide-eyed. His heartbeat sounded right against the skin of his chest, strong enough that he was sure Klaus could feel it.

Klaus rested his jaw on Haruki’s hairline and closed his eyes.

Just like the day he decided he would return to the division, it was less a moment of startling epiphany than it was a gentle sigh. All other kinds of guilt receded and he was holding onto just one guilt; Taki. He held Haruki to his chest and let the love pour in. Love for the kid he had been holding back to no avail. The love he could now no longer deny himself. But the love that he would remove himself from, deny Haruki, for Taki.

Haruki blinked and tried to breathe softly against Klaus’ skin, suddenly unsure of what to do with his hands, which were folded up near his chest. He tried to lower his chin and relax his face against Klaus’ chest and neck, afraid of any jarring move that might break the spell.

Rain thrummed harder against the windows and slowly drenched the world outside. In another wing of the compound, Meiji cried and Kolya held him, perplexed and worried. And elsewhere, Suguri lay awake, trying to understand things that were beyond his comprehension. And Ryoumei slept in one of the guest chambers, dreaming of his daughter all grown up.

Haruki had forgotten all of them.

The feeling of Klaus wrapping his arms around him, feeling his warmth along the length of his body, seemed like another of Haruki's fantasies concocted in his youth. Even as it happened, even as he fell asleep there, it didn't feel real.  
  
And it was further relegated to the realm of fantasy the next morning, when he awoke in an empty bed.

* * *

It was love that came in a completely different colour. So familiar was the feeling and yet so strikingly different the shade that it made Klaus think yet again of Hans and his colours.

He thought about the pure, startling white of roses. Their overwhelming, insistent scent. The secrets they held in their closed petals.

And then he thought of little yellow flowers growing in a quiet corner of the compound beside maiden grass. Open and earnest. He had walked past them, without even noticing them, without thinking to even ask what they were, but they had somehow left an imprint.

But it was the rose he had always been destined to find.

He awoke a little after dawn when the world was painted a dim blue. It was the time when Taki left him. Haruki was still asleep in his arms and Klaus pulled back a little just to see his face. To reassure himself of the way his chest rose and fell, to take in the sight of his strong shoulders and slender waist and long body. He curled his arm back over Haruki's head and ran his fingers through the few stubborn strands of hair that always refused to be brushed back.

He let himself bask in that colour, something that reminded him of the light that filled that bedroom one afternoon, for a few more minutes.

And then he gently removed his arms from around the commander. He pressed his lips to Haruki's left hip before he left and murmured something Haruki didn't hear.

The compound was still wet from last night's rain but a tentative sun was rising. A single bird somewhere nearby welcomed it with a throaty warble.

As much as being there breathed life into him, he knew he had to leave for Haruki’s sake. He knew what it was like to be Haruki. In fact, his own words to Taki came back to him.

_All you did… was find ways to push me away. And push me away. You made me feel like I was nothing to you. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of you pushing me away and then pulling me back. There's only so much I can take._

The words whirled in head as he packed.

* * *

Haruki didn't know why he felt restless. It was barely past dawn. A watery gold was only just leaking in over the blue outside.

There was something about Klaus’ silence the previous night and Klaus’ absence that morning that left him unsettled. He had left countless times before. Haruki could picture the wink he would throw over his shoulder more clearly than he could picture anything else about Klaus. And yet –

He stood by the window for a while. And then he slowly began dressing, wondering about the thing trying to tug him out of the room. In his preoccupation he was again slightly surprised when Kaiser didn't get to his feet to follow him out, and when Kolya wasn't there in front of the bedroom door like he was every morning.

He reached the small shed in the officer’s courtyard, where the door was partly open, in time to see Klaus close his wardrobe. His small closed suitcase was on the bed.

Klaus’ heart lifted and sank in quick succession to see him.

A short, painful silence followed. Klaus’ look, more than the suitcase and the brief glimpse of an empty wardrobe, was all Haruki needed to see to feel a pang of dread.

Klaus drew his eyes away from Haruki's look of confusion.

‘I was planning to come back up to your room,’ he said quietly. ‘Before I left.’

That feeling of dread grew slowly in the pit of Haruki's stomach. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Back home.’

Haruki realised his hand was still on the door of the shed.

‘Why?’

Klaus sighed. He tried in vain to search for an answer that wouldn't hurt. ‘You said it yourself last night.’

_If it’s too hard for you to keep doing this..._

Haruki had suddenly never regretted saying anything more in his life.

‘I didn't mean – I didn't think… you would leave. The revolution –’

‘You don't need me for that. You have better advisors around you. And now you have Shoda and Meiji-sama. There's not much else you need me for.’

Haruki was caught in a strange, selfish guilt. He knew a part of him ought to be relieved. This way, at least he could be sure that Klaus would be out of harm’s way. And yet rationality had taken a back seat. He only wanted Klaus to stay.

‘I shouldn’t be here, kid,’ said Klaus, echoing Suguri, whose advice he should have heeded a long time ago, before any of it had started. ‘It's not fair to you.’

Haruki's pulse surged. The depth of Klaus' voice spoke of something he'd suspected was within him for ages.

‘What – what do you mean fair to me?’

He knew what it was like to be Haruki. How awful it was to be the one who waited. How sometimes he waited with a sort of stoic, self-loathing fear for Taki to cast him away, exactly as he did after Hans' lies. How he felt a strange sense of peace after that; at least the door was closed and bolted.

He owed Haruki that much.

‘You know what I mean. If Taki were alive, it wouldn't be like this. I wouldn't have looked twice at you.’

It was a cruel, gentle tone that brought a slightly stunned silence.

But Haruki found himself wondering why the words didn't hurt him as much as they should. Perhaps it was because of how true they were.

‘That's okay,’ he said.

Klaus looked up in slight surprise and met a plaintive but measured gaze.

‘I've thought about it a lot. And I know that, of course I know that. I can't live up to him out there or... or for you. But if you… if you still want me –’ He blushed then and kicked himself for it. ‘Then I don't mind being, you know, second.’

Klaus' heart constricted painfully.

Haruki looked up with a shade of hope, thinking of how Klaus had pulled him close the night before. ‘So don't – don't leave if you're worried about hurting my feelings. You won't.’ He then said what he had been unable to say last night. ‘It means enough that you're here.’

The openness cut Klaus deep. His hands curled into fists. He remembered a time in his shed months and months ago when Haruki's bare, poignant words had moved him to stay.

Hurt him, said a small voice in his ear. Hurt him so he can't keep you here. So you have no choice but to go, even though you want so badly to stay.

‘Look, whatever you think you feel for me, it’s –’ Klaus struggled for words. ‘It’s not real.’

At the centre of everything, Haruki felt a small, hot flicker of defiance. How he felt was the only thing he was sure of.

‘It’s real to me,’ he said in a small voice.

‘Yeah, well, it's not real to me,’ Klaus snapped. He pushed past the self-loathing. He had to be merciless. He had to be a battering ram – an ancient snarling wooden wolf with flames in its mouth – if Haruki was to be rid of his curse once and for all.

He looked Haruki in the eye and Haruki’s insides gave a painful lurch.

‘You think I want this? To spend the rest of my life with a consolation prize? You think I'm happy to keep fucking you and wishing you were someone else?’

Haruki felt the words land like physical blows.

'Grow up, kid.'

There it was, finally. The kind of hurt that didn't compare to anything else Klaus had done to him.

As though to punish himself to the fullest extent he deserved, Klaus forced himself to watch as Haruki fought for words. He watched as Haruki's eyes swam with tears that didn't spill. And he watched as Haruki turned and left.

* * *

Haruki had already crossed the courtyard and was too far to hear the table rattle and the chair fall on its side.

Foot throbbing, Klaus sat on the edge of the bed and hung his head, hands on the back of his neck and elbows in his lap and a creature burrowing deep into his chest, hollowing it out, until he felt the rings of the hollows like a gong, like he had once a long time ago.

He reminded himself of what he was doing. He was a curse. He owed it to Haruki to leave. And he owed it to Taki. Taki.

Taki.

The love of his life. The _only_ love of his life, he reminded himself in something like a mantra.

* * *

Klaus’ absence was immediately noticeable, and to several people at once.

The first was Kolya, who arrived in the general meeting room a few hours later and saw Haruki standing alone at the head of the table, looking like the light had left his eyes. He remembered waking to the distant sound of a motorbike leaving the compound and wondering what happened.

Meiji, who had accompanied Kolya beneath a heavy hood, lowered it and looked at Haruki in surprise. Though he had only spoken to him for a short time the previous evening, he noticed the change that had come over him.

Though Hasebe and the other officers didn’t notice, being far too preoccupied with relief and veneration over having the rightful emperor in their midst, Suguri's gaze swept the room before landing on Haruki's drawn face.

Shoda, who arrived with Douman and Rudi, also picked up on both Klaus’ absence and the new indiscernible expression on the young commander’s face.

And he capitalised on it.

‘We need to strike as soon as possible with what we have,’ he said a few minutes later, after his plans were drawn up. ‘I'm aware you discussed it with your officers last night and the decision was made to wait. But the time is now, Commander. I can give the go order in less than three days with your backing.’

‘It will take weeks for all of our men and tanks to return from the Western Front,’ Hasebe tried again. ‘It would be foolish to strike now, we won't stand a chance.’

‘We have enough men, and we have waited long enough, Colonel. _My_ men have waited for this for years, for a real chance to hit Tachibana where it hurts. And it seems you have little faith in –’

‘How long you've waited is none of our concern.’ Hasebe said with a scowl before turning to Haruki. ‘Commander, if we rush into this headfirst like children wielding sticks, we’ll be making a huge mistake.’

Haruki hadn't said anything and his silence made his men anxious.

‘Meiji-sama,’ he said finally. ‘What do you think?’

Meiji was sitting on the commander’s right. He tried to read the look on Haruki's face.

‘I defer to your expertise, Commander,’ he said carefully.

Suguri’s pulse crept upwards. He had the distinct feeling that a voice was missing. A voice that would rein Haruki in.

‘Then we start now,’ Haruki announced firmly. The men heard the words with the finality of a gavel. Shoda’s smile was small but triumphant. ‘As soon as possible. I'll speak to the rest of the men today.’

The echo to stand to attention rang put across the square. The sun glimmered on shallow puddles of water between rows and rows of polished boots.

Suguri watched Haruki climb up the short stairs to the platform and thought he recognised that preoccupation. It was onet he had seen in Taki when he had been at his most agitated and most reckless; emotions both commanders managed to artfully mask behind their facade of strength and vitality in front of the division, but something Suguri had learned to see in Taki specifically.

And in both cases, he had seen it specifically when Klaus hadn't been there.

Haruki knew that several infantry units had been briefed by their colonels and could already be counted on. They stood immediately before the commander, also facing the square. But the rest of the men, an overwhelming majority, didn't yet know.

The soldiers’ discipline was such that the quality of the silence didn't change even when their commander delivered to them the impossible news. The upheaval in the chain of command. The confusion and startled happiness when Meiji, unveiled, took his place beside Haruki. The decision that was now in their hands, in each of their hands, in a way that went against their every instinct as a soldier.

Kolya swept a gaze over them all and understood precisely what they were going through.

‘This is as much your fight as it is mine,’ Haruki said, his voice loud and strong, with a hint of something else, something both tender and powerful that every man heard. ‘And it must be your decision and yours alone. Anyone who wishes to leave the division, has the rest of this day to do so, and you have my word that you will be free to do so. But if you remain, you will join the fight until the end and you will have my gratitude, as well as His Majesty’s, and that of the entire nation.’

The more Haruki spoke, the more his resolve hardened. It created a hard barrier against a hurt that almost consumed him hours ago.

Klaus’ words were carved into his chest. He had always known, it had always hovered behind him over the years like a grey, shapeless spectre, but now it had been given real form, real words; gilded and bold and cruel and true. He wasn't worthy. He would never be enough. He meant so little to the one who meant everything.

But he was in that world now, whether he was worthy of it or not. He had to push on. He had a job to do. His voice rose.

‘And no matter what lies ahead, no matter what happens in our clash with the capital, we can be assured, at least, that we did not bear their shame. That we resisted. And that we fought for our people, and for freedom, justice and honour.’

Meiji listened quietly and wondered, for the first time, how many wars in history had been started because of heartbreak.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a small, dusty town near the nation's border, Makimura was just about to close up shop when he heard the bell tinkle again. He was surprised. It was rare for anyone to arrive in his bar that close to closing time. And then, when he came out of the kitchen and saw his guest, his old life as a spy for the west came back to him in an instant.  
  
The last time he had seen Klaus von Wolfstadt was over ten years ago. And the captain had worn the same look of exhaustion and defeat.  
  
Makimura quietly gave him the key to his old room and said he'd send up some tonkatsu. He didn't understand the small wry smile Klaus gave him in response.  
  
_Where did you go?_ Taki had asked him once. _When I exiled you?_  
_  
The old man found me somewhere safer to lay low. I stayed in a little room above an old bar. Two months of push-ups and sit-ups and listening to the radio and eating Makimura’s godawful food. Forget being a spy, his shitty excuse for tonkatsu should have run him out of the country._

He knew he should have left the country. But, like last time, something kept him there. Perhaps it was something as simple as wanting to avoid Claudia’s looks and questions if he went back to the cottage.

The last time he was there, in his room above the bar, he had left as soon as he heard about the Reizen assassinations. And then the first voice that had called to him, the first voice that was looking for him in the static of the air from miles and miles away, was young Haruki's.

 _I – I was on the radio pretty much every night,_ Haruki had admitted to him later.

_Doing what?_

Haruki had blushed. He was only a cadet. Fourteen years old.

_Listening for you._

The hallway outside his room, the little brass numbers, the striped pattern of the bedspread. The splotches on the ceiling above his bed that he’d memorised. The constant pull, the membrane that he could still feel linking him to his commander, despite how much he had hurt him and failed him.

He waited for something. Perhaps he would wait until the revolution was over and Meiji back on the throne and Haruki was safe.

In reality, it felt like he was waiting to hear a voice. Taki's voice, somehow, telling him what to do. Haruki's voice, somehow, calling him back. But he knew neither of them would call.


	62. Taki's Careful, Beautiful Words

The war room in the Imperial Palace was abuzz. Tachibana felt himself slipping out of it, past the clipped, raised voices of his advisors and ministers. He remembered how the palace grounds beyond were eerily calm in the evening air after he left the residence. He thought of his wife, who had never once said a word against him, who had never questioned his rise to power, watching him with nervous eyes for the first time.

It all seemed to be spiralling out of his control. First with the arrest of Nakamori. Then Meiji's escape. And now word had reached him that Yamamoto was mobilising his forces against the capital.

It always seemed to come back to the Rosen Maiden Fifteenth Armoured Division.

Not even in the wake of Roskilde, when the fear of being arrested weighed on him daily, did Tachibana feel the sense that his physical safety was in question. As ludicrous as it was for a single division, one that was not even at its full strength, to declare a coup against his government, the thought crossed his mind that they might, in fact, succeed. And the consequences of that were unthinkable.

So far, the press had been kept silent. Tachibana hoped he could sweep the whole mess under the rug in less than a day. He longed to see Yamamoto and his colonels standing against the wall.

‘Your Majesty,’ his foreign minister suddenly interjected, after he entered the war room with a quick bow. ‘Minister Rossi is on the phone for you. He insists on speaking with Your Majesty at once.’

The whole room rose to its feet when the emperor stood up. He swept past them without a word and heard the ruckus resume when the doors closed.

In his office, he exhaled and picked up the phone.

‘I’m hearing disturbing things from my people about what’s going on over there,’ said Rossi, each syllable stressed and drawn out. Tachibana could too easily picture the man whose likeness to a wizened lion had increased over the course of his long reign in Eurote.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ Tachibana said tersely. He couldn’t afford to lose Eurote as an ally.

‘I would prefer to know sooner rather than later if I must carry on the war with the west alone, while you deal with your... situation. Which now involves trouble with a division in your _army,_ according to my informants.’

‘It will be over in a day,’ Tachibana insisted. He heard and recognised the tone in Rossi's voice. It was the same one Tachibana himself had used over the phone to Mussolin, right before abandoning the Eurotean dictator to his own fate. ‘We’re already moving in on that division as we speak. They won’t even get as far as the capital.’

The silence on the other end of the line hinted at Rossi’s skepticism. And it reflected Tachibana’s own.

* * *

When the call came, it came from someone completely unexpected.

Four days after Klaus rode out of the compound, Makimura came to his door and told him someone had rung the inn looking for him.

Hope rushed to Klaus’ head before he could stop it. It even lingered for a few moments of denial after Makimura told him the caller was his sister.

‘Claudia?’

_‘Thank heavens! You’re impossible to find sometimes, little brother.’_

Klaus raised his eyebrows in disbelief and glanced at Makimura who tied an apron about his waist before he went into the kitchen. With the phone wedged between his ear and and shoulder, Klaus sat down at the small table in the entrance foyer.

‘How did you know I was here?’

_‘I've been trying to reach you for a whole day. So I called Emmerich.’_

Klaus made a noise of frustration.

_‘I knew you’d react like that, but it was the only thing I could think of. Emmerich contacted someone, some old man he said you used to know, and the old man passed along Makimura’s phone number – anyway, it’ll take too long to explain –’_

‘I’m not surprised that Emmerich suddenly cares where I am when I might be useful to him again.’

Claudia sighed. _'Emmerich isn’t the point. A call came for you here, from someone at the division. It sounded urgent. He_ _–_ _oh, dear, what was his name? I wrote it down…’_

It sounded as though Claudia was rifling through items trying to find something. Klaus’ pulse picked up again.

‘Was it Haruki?’

Claudia’s reply sounded distracted. _‘Really, Klaus, if it was Haruki, do you think I would have needed to write his name down? Oh, here it is. It was a Major... Suguri. He told me that you’d left the division four days ago, so he thought you had already arrived at the cottage.’_

Klaus frowned in confusion. ‘Suguri? What did he want?’

_‘He didn’t say, exactly. And to be honest, he didn’t speak the language very well, I don’t think I understood. It sounded like he said you left something important behind.’_

‘At the division?’

_‘I assume so.’_

Klaus’ confusion grew. He mentally reviewed the clothes and few meagre items he had thrown into his suitcase. ‘I didn’t leave anything behind.’

_‘Maybe I misunderstood. Whatever it is, he sounded tense, Klaus. Plus, he went to the trouble of contacting us just to find you. I think you should call him.’_

Klaus didn’t say anything for a while.

_‘Klaus?’_

‘Yeah. Thanks, Claud. I’ll call him.’

In the cottage, Claudia gripped the phone a little harder. Every time she heard that tone in his voice, her anxiety went up a few notches. She wondered why Klaus had left the division and why he hadn’t returned home. Why he seemed to be caught somewhere in between.

She told him to take care of himself and gently placed the phone back on the receiver. Her eyes landed on a shelf in the kitchen where she had placed Heinrich’s red model airplane.

After a few tense seconds of sitting by the phone, Klaus grit his teeth and asked the operator to be put through to the Fifteenth. The operator informed him that all lines to and from the compound had been cut.

Klaus hung up with a strange sensation tingling in his fingertips. It felt as though things had already been set in motion. But it was still too early; surely Haruki hadn’t already declared war against the capital. Klaus had been keeping an ear on the news and hadn’t heard anything.

And Suguri had called the cottage. He must have gone to the trouble of unearthing the information Klaus had sent him two years ago when he asked to see Taki – all to try and find Klaus. It didn’t make sense.

He stared at the creases in his trousers, the faded shine of his boots, the scuffed floor of the foyer. A few diners wandered into the inn for a late lunch. The smell of cooking meat wafted from the kitchen. Earlier, when Makimura came to his door to announce the phone call, Klaus had been sitting by the radio, folding a tiny receipt over and over again in an origami pattern that didn’t want to resolve into anything. He felt the keys to his bike weighing in his pocket.

Makimura came out bearing two heavy dishes of food which he set down before his patrons. Then he glanced at the small circular table in the foyer and noticed Klaus was gone. Upstairs, he rapped on the door and got no answer. He opened it hesitantly and saw that the few items Klaus had with him were no longer there. Puzzled, he went to the desk and picked up a small piece of paper, folded over several times into a shape that almost resembled a tiny, open flower.

* * *

After a four-hour ride, Klaus reached the main entrance of the compound and was startled when he came face-to-face with almost a dozen guns and shouted warnings. Once they recognised the captain, the guns and guards relaxed.

And the latter explained to him that the commander had left hours ago and, in fact, so had almost the whole division.

‘Where did they go?’

‘The capital, sir.’

His face grim, Klaus strode towards his shed in the courtyard with one of the second-lieutenants in step with him, trying to brief him as quickly as he could. He learned that the capital seemed to be aware of the threat against the emperor and had mobilised a few tank and infantry forces to subdue the division. The Fourteenth was on standby only a few klicks away to intercept them.

Meanwhile, the commander and the Fifteenth had taken up positions closer to the capital, with the commander himself stationed at one of the western embassies, from where they planned to strike against the capital. An all-out conflict was expected soon, the second-lieutenant reported, by which point Tachibana wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret any longer that he was facing a coup.

Klaus let out an irate sigh.

‘Who’s left here?’

‘A few infantry units, sir. And Meiji-sama,' he remembered. 'With double the security around his room and building. The commander thinks it’s safer here than closer to the capital.’

‘Yeah, no shit.’

Heart heavy, he dismissed the second-lieutenant just as he reached the officer’s courtyard.

His back and legs ached from the four-hour ride and the soft skin near his temples began to throb. The ground was still wet from intermittent summer showers. Cicadas began a screech that wouldn’t let up for a whole season.

It only took a few seconds of being back in his shed for Klaus to confirm that he hadn’t left anything behind. He stared bleakly at the table that stood at an angle against the wall and the chair that was lying on its side. He only had a vague recollection of having kicked it.

Being there, he was forced to confront his own decision to have so easily and unthinkingly careened back to the division, simply by dint of a vague message left by a man who hated his guts. He realised how much he wanted to be close to Haruki despite the fact that the kid, in all likelihood, despised him now too.

He turned at the sound of footsteps.

He and Suguri stared at one another across the threshold. The army doctor had never once visited Klaus in his shed and it was strange to see him there; a sight that married two halves of the compound in a way that didn’t fit.

‘They told me you came back,’ Suguri said stiffly.

By then, Klaus’ head was pulsing in angry contractions. Anger at himself and what the hell he was doing there. Anger for being forever caught between worlds. Anger, above all, over how much he had hoped Suguri’s footsteps were Haruki’s.

‘I got your message,’ Klaus said coldly. ‘What was it, code? I didn’t leave anything behind.’

Suguri hesitated, his eyes somewhere on the floor. He still stood just beyond the door as though waiting to be invited in. Klaus made no such invitation. He noticed Suguri held something in his hand by his side.

‘May I come in?’ he asked, with a stiffness that didn’t surprise Klaus but with a careful formality that did.

* * *

Suguri remembered Klaus letting him into the cottage two years ago. They had exchanged a look that communicated too much and nothing at all. Klaus was already well into the process of blaming himself for what was happening to Taki and he knew Suguri, alone, joined him in that blame.

He had tried to make himself busy in the kitchen as Suguri walked down the short hallway into the bedroom. The doctor struggled to absorb the strange fact that the young prince he had known since he was a child, a child he had considered his own, had spent the past eight years in such a small corner of the world. In a cottage of bare brick walls and the smell of sandalwood.

And he was further shocked when he entered the bedroom to see Taki himself. Taki, who barely recognised him and murmured only a few words. A hand that was pale and clammy and a body and mind that were too far gone for Suguri, for any doctor, any parent, to bring him back.

He had waited for Taki to slip into a fitful sleep before he left the room, tears stinging at his eyes and in the back of his throat. He heard Klaus moving about in the kitchen and he walked back into the living room, where a bureau was set against the front window. A window that overlooked the wheat stalks.

Just as Taki had said, in the bottom drawer, beneath a stack of unused paper, was an unsealed envelope addressed to Klaus.

 _When I’m gone,_ he had said.

And so Suguri had taken it with him. He had every intention to give it to Klaus when the time came.

But then he had caved to a baser urge. He had wondered for so long about what that bond meant. Why it had pulled Taki away from everything he knew. It was grief and confusion and even a kind of prickling curiosity. A need to know.

He read the letter several times over to make sense of it.

And he kept it.

He kept it for reasons that seemed prudent for years. And it was only in the past week that he wondered whether he had mistaken grief and anger and resentment for prudence.

And so now, he stood before Klaus and felt, for the first time, that he owed the westerner an apology.

‘I should have –’ he began before clearing his throat. ‘I should have given you this a long time ago.’

Klaus took the envelope and a flare of shock spread from his chest to his head as soon as he saw his name on the back, in handwriting that he could have recognised anywhere.

He unfolded the single piece of paper within and didn’t realise that he was holding his breath.

* * *

_Klaus,_

_My knight. You have endured well._

_It will be a long time before you forgive yourself. I hope you understand that this was far beyond your reach. I hope you understand how much it meant to me that you tried nevertheless. I saw how much you tried every day and how much it took from you._

_We both carried our burdens. Yours was mine. And mine was the fear that by dying, I was slowly killing you. In mind, if not in body, you were wasting away. For a while, I had no hope._

_And then one day, he appeared as if by magic among the golden stalks outside._

_As I'm writing, you are outside instructing Haruki on the harvest. The sun is blinding on the swaying fields and he has just thrown his pack to the ground for a rest, despite all of his bravado only twenty minutes ago. You are standing with your hands on your hips not far from where you first encountered him a few days ago. There is a smile on your face that I know well but have not seen in recent memory. Though it is hard to explain why, your laughter makes it so that I can finally feel the breeze that has moved these stalks for months._

_In only a few days, young Haruki has lifted my burden. It may even appear that he has lifted yours, though I fear in reality that yours is yours alone to bear._

_Forgive me, Klaus. Forgive me for being unable to give you more. Whether by design or by circumstance, even at our closest, I was always far away. There is a terrible power in words and deeds, in the commandments carved in me since birth and the vows that have shadowed my every footstep even as far as this soft, golden land. It is so strong that I cannot conclude whether it is a force from within or without – a lightning strike from the Gods themselves. Whatever the case, I could never give myself to you the way you wanted. The way I wanted._

_But already I can see in him all of what I could not give. There is more in him than even he knows. You have to help him find it._

_The days are changing. I can feel it now in the murmurs on the street, murmurs which have been carried on the wind from my land where a great change is taking place. Commander Haruki Yamamoto will not have the same fog woven around him that I had. He will see with the eyes of the young. He will see it all clearly. You and he will be able to build a new world together._

_Please listen, my knight. For these are my last commands to you:_

_You will want to stay on these fields and die with me. You cannot._

_You will want to deny him because of me. You must not._

_You were born to be a knight. You were born to be at your commander's side._

_And you must know, though I could not express it before, that you have made me happier than I ever thought possible._

_It is your turn now. Go to him._

_Yours,_

_Taki_

* * *

Suguri took a step back when he noticed the letter was shaking in Klaus' hand. He was still hunched over it, a thatch of hair keeping his face hidden from view. Out of nowhere, it made Suguri think back to a day when he called him a hulking lout.

Very slowly, almost as though a divine string was being pulled against his will, Klaus looked up. Suguri held back a gasp. The wild anger in his gaze was something Suguri was used to. The streaming tears were not.

'How?' Klaus began in a low rumble. 'How could you keep this from me for two whole fucking _years?'_

The shed was silent. It sat discreetly amidst cicada trills. A feline shadow skirted over the cracked shingle roof.

Somewhere far in the distance, the first grenade tore the air apart. Having travelled miles to reach the shed, the sound was reduced to a dry, unassuming thud. Both men knew what it meant as clearly as if they saw the explosion before their eyes. But neither moved.

Klaus’ heart felt like it was rent. He eased his grip on the letter when he realised he was crumpling its edges in anger – in confusion and grief that sounded in a brand new chord. The words didn’t seem real. They _couldn’t_ be real. It wasn’t possible for Taki to have known so much, and so long ago.

But what was real was the fact that Klaus was only reading them now. That Suguri had kept it from him for years.

‘I was… wrong,’ Suguri said, managing to sound both gruff and nervous. The look in Klaus’ eye was still making him contemplate taking another step back. He held his ground.

‘You had no right to keep it from me,’ Klaus said, his voice shaking in place of his hands. ‘Taki wanted me to see it… as soon as he – you had no right –’

_I could never give myself to you the way I wanted. The way I wanted._

Suguri was saying something else but Klaus couldn’t hear him. The feeling in his chest and head then was uncannily similar to the day a shell blast had knocked him from the bike. He realised only then that tears were blurring his vision and coming down his face, all in front of Suguri. He didn’t care.

_But already I can see in him all of what I could not give._

Suguri trailed off when it occurred to him that Klaus wasn’t even listening.

‘What?’ Klaus said absently, almost in a snap, trying to blink his eyes clear, still staring at Taki's words.

Suguri’s stomach churned with the guilt and sheer discomfort over seeing Klaus reduced to tears.

‘I – I said I was wrong about you and…’

And Suguri found himself in the dilemma he knew he would face days ago when he decided it was time for Klaus to see it.

‘I thought you were… a dangerous influence,’ he said stiffly. ‘On Taki-sama. I didn’t understand what you… or why he…’ He let out a frustrated grunt and tried to shift gears. ‘When I read the letter, I realised that it would bring you here, to the division, as soon as Taki-sama was gone. Haruki-sama was already too passionate and reckless. I thought your being here would make it worse. I was wrong.’

And finally, Klaus looked back at him, though Suguri realised he preferred not being on the end of that razor-sharp gaze.

The distant thud of another grenade explosion reached the shed. The new landscape had already emerged, where the divisions that had joined the rebellion would face off against the capital.

Suguri wouldn’t go so far as to admit that he had also, most likely, been wrong about Klaus’ influence on Taki. He had lashed out enough times that he couldn’t bear the shame of a retraction now, to admit that Taki had most likely, by all accounts, by account of the letter he had written in his own hand, found happiness. And that Klaus had nothing to do with his illness or his death. That, if anything, Klaus had made him stronger. Standing in Klaus’ small room, he couldn’t bring himself to admit any of it. But he could admit to something else.

‘I think Haruki-sama needs you. He listens to you. And everything you've said about the capital and this war is counsel he needs to hear.’

It was yet another thing Suguri couldn’t articulate; the changes he had seen in Klaus since the last war. Klaus, now, was more wise and weathered, more mature in a way he couldn’t pinpoint and which, he now realised, might even owe to Taki's influence on him. Suguri had turned a wilful blind eye to it over the past year until it was too late.

‘I was wrong,’ he repeated, his voice sounding pained. ‘About a lot of things. I’m –’

The apology was there; all Suguri had to do was string it together. But he couldn’t.

And Klaus was left feeling dizzy, hovering over an abyss that had opened between past and present. Suguri quietly left the shed and closed the door, unsure, as always, about whether he had done the right thing.

_And then one day, he appeared as if by magic among the golden stalks outside._

* * *

He had said to Midori not long ago that he wanted only to hear Taki’s voice. To hear him tell Klaus what to do.

And now that he had it, he felt paralysed. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel right.

He still couldn’t believe the existence of the letter itself. Taki’s foresight. His gentle voice, which Klaus hadn’t heard for two years no matter how many times he had spoken to him. His words which were like fingers running through Klaus’ hair as they lay together in a clearing.

Only the escalating noise of the battle being waged a few klicks away gave any indication that time was passing. The sound of something that could very well have been a shell blast finally roused Klaus enough to bring him to his feet.

He folded the letter along the single crease that was already there. The crease that Taki had made with his own touch, his own fingertips. That knowledge was enough for Klaus to feel another wave of sorrow. He slipped it carefully into the front pocket of his jacket, where his heart still pounded like he had been running.

Out near the entrance to the compound, the guards were keeping their eyes and ears peeled and some of them were clustered around a radio. Klaus gathered that the Fourteenth was holding its own well, that the first wave of soldiers sent by the emperor had been held back and forced to call a retreat.

‘Any news from the capital?’ Klaus asked, his mind still swimming, sounding dazed despite his attempt to focus.

‘All’s quiet there, sir. Wolfpup’s still in the new lair, no word that either side has fired a shot.’

A fine rain began to fall. Klaus wondered, suddenly, whether he was about to wake up to the smell of Makimura’s cooking. He took a few steps away from the group huddled around the radio. In the corner of his eye was his bike, sitting there as though waiting for him to give it a command. Take him somewhere. He faced the dark, near-empty compound and felt the gentle mist of rain falling in his hair.

Near-empty compound, he realised. Not completely empty. There was someone there who might be able to make it feel real. To let him know, unequivocally, whether or not he was dreaming.

* * *

In the past twenty-six years, Meiji could only remember two times when he had fallen into a deep, restful sleep. The first was the night he met Kolya. And the second was the following night, after Kolya made his lifelong pledge in the small private courtyard just outside the room.

Since Kolya left with Haruki to begin the war against the capital, Meiji fell back on a familiar insomnia for more reasons than one. Which was why, as he lay awake on the large bed in his guest bedroom late one night, he was alert enough to hear the faint knock on his door.

He sat up and snapped on the bedside lamp, feeling a flare of relief and even excitement. He draped a long robe over his yukata and gathered his hair forwards over his left shoulder with a kind of self-consciousness that almost made him smile.

His heart fell, though only slightly, when he opened the door to Klaus.

* * *

‘I’ll be out of your hair soon. I get the feeling I’m in for it if Kolya catches me in your bedroom in the middle of the night.’

Meiji chuckled and closed the door after Klaus. ‘He does seem like the overprotective type.’

‘You have no idea,’ Klaus said dryly, thinking of the bruises on his face and ribs that had only just begun to fade. ‘Where is your dazzling knight anyway?’

‘I’ve sent him to fight a war on my behalf,’ Meiji said, with a smile that purported to be wry but revealed a flicker of uncharacteristic anxiety. ‘And now I await his return. Such is the way of it, I hear, between master and knight.’

‘Sounds about right.’

Despite Klaus' words, Meiji noticed he didn’t smile and in fact hadn’t done so even once since he entered the room. He had wandered towards the writing desk. An idle hand reached out to touch the back of the chair. He seemed to be carrying something heavy on his shoulders.

‘What can I do for you, Captain?’ Meiji said gently.

Klaus hesitated for a long time.

‘I don’t know what to do anymore,’ he said, his voice suddenly so low and so tremulous that Meiji felt it pull on his heartstrings. ‘I’ve made so many mistakes. I don’t know if the next move I make – if it’ll also be the wrong one.’

Meiji absorbed his words and waited patiently.

Without saying anything more, Klaus turned and walked to him, drawing something out of his pocket. A sheet of writing paper, with a single, crisp crease through the centre. And a flowing script that Meiji saw through the sheet before Klaus handed it to him.

He walked slowly to the bed as he read through the letter and sat on its edge just as he reached the final few words. Klaus watched him.

Meiji remembered that feeling, that slow sorrow, when Kolya told him about Taki’s death on a warehouse floor across from a small fire. It came back again, flickering to light, as he read Taki’s careful, beautiful words. Words that spoke of a selflessness and wisdom that almost made Meiji feel young. A purity and grace that had lasted his whole life and even after his death. Meiji's chest ached once more at the injustice of such a loss.

He couldn’t even imagine what reading it would have done to Klaus.

‘Your master was one of a kind.’ He re-read the last few lines again as he spoke. ‘And I doubt there will ever be another like him, in this or any other age.’

Klaus felt a lump rise in his throat and tears threatened to find him again.

‘How could he have known?’ he managed in a strained voice, thinking of all Taki had written about Haruki. ‘Haruki was only with us for a few days. How did Taki –?’

‘Love is a curious state of mind,’ Meiji said, in a light, delicate cadence. ‘Perhaps the most curious of all states. It can either heighten the senses or make us tragically dense, sometimes in the very same instance. It appears Taki, however, only experienced a great deal of the former, to admirable effect.’

And Klaus knew he himself had been nothing but the latter, no matter what the instance. The lightly ironic look on Meiji's face implied he thought the same.

‘I think I understand why you’re here,’ said Meiji. He thought of how Taki had come to him, almost exactly like this, filled with doubts that were in a different vein but carried similar echoes. He thought of how he himself and Taki had been bound by the same circumstance; the same burdens of lineage and responsibility. And he and Klaus were bound now by the same grief. And, as fate would have it, they had arrived at the same crossroads.

He realised, with a certain world-weariness, that he had managed to become an authority on both purity and grief. Perhaps with reason, he reflected.

Klaus paced slowly back to the chair and drew it out before sitting down, each of his actions absent. His gaze was elsewhere.

‘I know Taki wants me to help Haruki with all of this, with what’s happening out there, but I’ve always –’ He paused and stared at his hands. ‘I’ve always had this feeling that just being near Haruki… that I’ll hurt him somehow.’

Meiji remembered how Haruki had looked over the past few days and kept the thought to himself that Klaus had already done that. In any case, it sounded like Klaus was talking about something more arcane.

‘I admit, given recent events involving Kolya, I have been reconsidering my stance on this whole business involving gods and fate. But I still cannot condone decisions like yours being made solely on the whim of intuition. Curses are hardly –’

‘People die around me,’ Klaus said simply.

‘You’re a man of war, Captain,’ Meiji replied, his tone sympathetic. ‘Forgive me for saying so, but that’s a burden that all of you share.’

Klaus breathed out as gently as he could. Like Suguri, he couldn’t bring himself to explain in any greater depth. Besides that, he wanted, more than anything, to believe Meiji’s quiet, measured words.

Meiji’s tone shifted subtly. ‘And, given how many years I spent blaming myself for Sotaro’s death, I don’t think it’s fair for you to claim a monopoly on that particular curse.’

Klaus glanced up at that. His knowledge of Meiji’s past, and what Meiji had gone through only recently with Kolya, was the reason he had made the walk across the compound.

‘What you said to me on the plane,’ he said, aware of the odd imploring note in his voice. ‘What you said about Kolya. That's – that was how I felt about Taki. My whole life, I – he was the one I was always meant to find. It... doesn't feel like that with Haruki.’ It’s a different colour, he thought again. A different scent.

Meiji remembered waking to the touch of Kolya’s huge, warm hands. A feeling that was brand new and age-old.

‘Love that feels written by the hand of fate – it is quite a thing,’ he agreed. But after a moment's thought, he added, ‘In fact, the only thing that might rival it is a love that has lived earnestly and silently for a decade.’ He smiled. ‘If I am to understand Captain Fukushima’s little diatribe.’

Klaus clenched his jaw until his back teeth ached. He got up and walked to the other side of the room, a hand in his hair behind his ear. He stopped beside the double doors to the courtyard. He didn’t know why his heart was pounding. He waited for the headache to strike up its by-then familiar accompaniment, but it didn't come. If anything he was thinking painfully clearly.

_And you must know, though I could not express it before, that you have made me happier than I ever thought possible._

He had never known for sure. He had always doubted it. But there it was, in Taki's own handwriting. A kind of happiness that eluded Klaus because of that same doubt.

_It is your turn now._

It couldn't be so simple. As much as he wanted it, it didn't feel right.

Somewhere behind him, Meiji spoke to him softly of other things, his eyes still on the page. Things that Klaus was sure held little opals of wisdom that he ought to consider. But his mind was still caught elsewhere. A smile that reached deep brown eyes. Long, slender hands on Klaus' face and chest, tracing out a light scar on his shin. A touch that that eased the clutch of the talons and the pain in his body. Laughter that pulled him out of the pit.

Meiji looked over his shoulder. He took a moment to appreciate the outline of Klaus against the doorway to the courtyard. He then got up and walked across the room towards him, the bottom of his robes whispering on the floor. He held out the letter and Klaus took it back. Meiji then glanced up and took his time observing Klaus’ strong, handsome features, saturated and pronounced in the half-light cast by the bedside lamp.

‘The years have been kind to you. I always knew the scar would be a nice touch.’

Klaus managed a small smile. ‘And you look like you haven’t aged a day. What’s your secret?’

Meiji sighed. ‘Coups and captivity, it would seem.’

‘It’s good to have you back.’

‘I have you to thank for that. You and Kolya. And your commander, of course.’ He smiled. ‘When you see young Haruki, be sure to let him know I send my thanks for all he's doing out there.’

Klaus’ smile flickered and went away. Flashes of memory, like photos on a projector. He had hurt Haruki so many times. Over the past year, he had done so without even realising it. And then he had done it again on purpose, the worst blow yet, just so he could leave. So Haruki would stop thinking about him for good. The thought of seeing him now...

‘He'll never trust me again,’ he said, more to himself than Meiji.

Meiji read volumes in Klaus’ expression.

‘Kolya has told me enough, and I have seen enough, to understand the kind of person he is, this young commander of the Fifteenth. And by nature, saints tend to forgive sinners, even for the worst of their transgressions.’

He saw the doubt and self-loathing lingering on Klaus’ face. He watched Klaus blink and glance down at the letter.

He then thought of the simple words that Kolya had said several nights ago that had erased all doubt and reduced him to tears.

‘If you feel there are too many voices telling you what to do,’ he said softly. ‘Listen to the one you didn't think you would ever hear again.’

Meiji didn’t need to follow that piercing golden gaze to know which line Klaus was reading. Three quiet words at the very bottom.

‘It seems that his final command is quite clear.’

The world outside had fallen silent once more. Feline shadows seemed to take shape everywhere between slivers of moonlight. Just beyond the glass-panelled doors, the roses rustled among dark jade petals. White roses, all.


	63. Go to Him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my amazing readers!
> 
> This is a quick note to say I changed the title of this chapter. I was just re-reading the end of the previous chapter, and it suddenly seemed so obvious what this one should be called! As a result, this is now the only chapter in the whole story where the title isn't actually in the text of the chapter itself, but it was way too fitting to pass up. 
> 
> Hope you agree, and thank you guys for the millionth time for reading and for all the love! <3

He didn’t know if it was because of adrenaline. Or divine inspiration. Or whether it was simply because he had heard the voice of someone he never thought he would hear from again. Or if it was the prospect of going to someone whose face appeared to him like a fire-lit window on a cold, sleepless night long past.

Whatever it was, Klaus felt the wind tearing through his hair and past his goggles in a new way. He filled his lungs with air. He even thought he heard the soft, tremulous notes of a very old record; older than Reinhart's. One that he had heard even before the first war, before he knew what it was like to suffer loss. It hailed from a nation where mandolins were strummed without pause until they sounded like the high voices of little birds. Mandolins and distant tinkling lights and yellow flowers.

He hoped he would remember to ask Watanabe for the name of those little yellow flowers. The ones which grew bright and earnest among the maiden grass in a hidden corner of the compound.

The rain fell harder the further he rode towards the capital. The road skewed treacherously beneath the tyres of his bike around each bend, but he didn’t slow down.

And only a few klicks away, he approached the battle he had heard as distant thuds from his shed. Tachibana's men had struck again on the open roads near the Fifteenth Armoured Division, hoping to engulf the rogue division in one night.

But the Fourteenth was ready. Their men crouched low in the land that dipped into crops and paddy fields or behind trees on the other side of the road; lining and skirting terrain that they knew like the back of their hand. And further down the road, their tanks manned the front lines. The jeeps and trucks and dismounted troops they were up against – an infantry division – stood no chance.

After all of his sorties with the Fourteenth, the sight of Klaus on his bike was a familiar one to every soldier he passed. With rifles pointed ahead, they glanced over their shoulders at the sharp sound of the engine and felt a flare of hope as Klaus zipped by them straight into the fray, his single headlight blurred by rain.

On the road ahead of him, two jeeps were overturned. Klaus caught sight of the front line of tanks, an imposing row of three Ferdinands, which was making quick work of unmounted troops and jeeps. He zoomed between them and in front of them, smelling the metal of their skin and the gunpowder in the air. The elixir of war.

Thunder crashed at the same moment that a stun grenade was let off. Light and sound exploded only a short distance away and Klaus pulled out his own grenades, the ones he had taken from an almost empty weapons hold at the division. Pins were pulled with his teeth and he sent the grenades soaring. The soldiers gathered around anti-tank missiles scattered or fell, lost in explosions.

Klaus deftly skirted the blast radius and rounded the bend of a tree-covered ridge just in time to feel something huge, fast and deadly hurtle straight past at eye level and blast into the ground behind him, directly in front of one of the tanks. The anti-tank missile had missed both Klaus and the tank by a hair’s breadth. Klaus was left to wheel the bike around, gasping at the heat of it, the way he had felt the air being torn and displaced as it flew past. Heart pounding out of his ribs, he turned back and aimed straight for its source, grenades at the ready, and took out the soldiers up ahead in the middle of the road who were just about to reload.

After executing and evading the latest explosion, he gunned the bike over a slight incline between trees, turning back to survey what he could. The capital's division was falling back, jeeps turning tail and men firing haphazardly to cover their retreat. It was an easy win for the Fourteenth. The capital had severely underestimated them. There was nothing for Klaus to do but to return to the road, point his bike north and keep going.

And as he rode, he felt a laugh bubble up from his gut – a laugh that was lost in the wind and rain – at how hair-raisingly close he had just been to death, yet again. It came to him in another burst of adrenaline and inspiration that perhaps his god-given gift had always been this, right under his nose the whole time, during all three wars and everything that had happened in between. Perhaps he was destined to never die.

 _You're not as invincible as you think you are,_ Claudia had written in one of her letters. Klaus couldn't wait to enlighten her.

* * *

As he approached the capital, he became more alert but found it was mostly unwarranted. The streets and storefronts were all deserted, with only an increase in military and police patrol, who eyed Klaus nervously as he passed, one or two even raising their guns before quickly losing steam when they discovered he didn’t pose any kind of threat.

There appeared to be no sign of the fact that an entire armoured division had been dispatched to surround and attack the nation’s capital. Once again, he found new reason to be impressed with Haruki’s military acumen. He imagined the commander overseeing each unit, staggering their deployment, only a few at a time, to take up strategic points in and around the capital, all waiting to strike. He wondered whether Onokami or any of the other tanks had also been mobilised.

The commander himself, as he had learned back at the compound, was in the very heart of the capital. He wound his way through the streets to the government quarter. The welcome he received at the gates of the western embassy was, at first, similar to the one outside the division. But they were men of the Fifteenth, and they knew the captain well.

‘Do me a favour,’ he said as he was let in and one of the soldiers picked up the phone. ‘Don’t tell the commander I’m here.’

He was told that while the Fourteenth continued to draw the capital’s attention further south, the Fifteenth and the _Hitobito_ were planning to mobilise all forces stationed in and around the city and strike the following morning.

After what he had seen, he wondered for the first time whether Haruki and Shoda’s temerity might actually pay off.

Klaus checked his watch. It was almost two in the morning. He imagined all the soldiers who would be mustered in the morning, whether there at the embassy or in makeshift barracks across the city wherever they were, lying in wait like shadows. Though most of them would be asleep, dreaming of their families, he knew some of them would be lying awake, experiencing that specific insomnia and restlessness before battle.

And he knew which of the two categories Haruki fell into.

One of the soldiers at the gate had given him directions to the commander’s quarters, which wasn’t in the adjacent residence but in the embassy itself. Before the ambassadors were sent home at the outbreak of war, it was a room which had been used by Feulner as his private study.

It was modest by Feulner’s standards. Hasebe’s old training as Grand Chamberlain had kicked in when he insisted that Haruki take the study for his quarters, hoping to encourage the commander to get some sleep in the small adjoining bedroom which Feulner had used during nights when work kept him up.

Yet two in the morning found him awake for the second night in a row, reading the report that outlined the Fourteenth’s brush with new troops sent by the capital a handful of hours ago. He reviewed the list of casualties and offensive ideas for the following day. And he tried not to dwell on a small detail; a note in Commander Yagata's report which mentioned a rider on a motorbike who had helped mow down the anti-tank formations in the front lines.

It had been over four days. Klaus was already in the west and Haruki knew he had to learn to stop seeing him in meaningless details like those. In those few days, Haruki had thrown himself into the new campaign, refusing to slow down. He hadn't slept in almost thirty-six hours. And it had helped.

In fact, he had managed to successfully distract himself from that detail. Sometimes he even found he was able to banish thoughts about Klaus completely. Sometimes a whole hour or two would pass without a sudden wayward thought brushing against him like a graze against an open wound. He even dared to hope, for the first time, whether it was possible that the wound might heal, given enough time. He knew though, even when such idle thoughts occurred to him, that it was a false hope.

Three short knocks pulled his attention up from Yagata's report. He glanced at his watch in puzzlement. He had ordered all of his men who weren't on night duty, including his officers, to turn in for the night in preparation for their strike tomorrow.

‘Kolya?’

The door opened.

‘Nope.’

It was the same time of night and the same words uttered – a fire-lit memory from the previous winter that Klaus visited often. He remembered thinking that Haruki’s smile had been worth the walk through the winter cold.

_Klaus, what are you doing up so late?_

_Oh, you know. I was just wandering around in the dark. Saw your light was on. Thought I’d interrupt whatever big, important thing you were working on._

This time, however, there wasn't a trace of a smile on the commander's face.

Haruki stood in his shirtsleeves, suspenders loose around his hips, with a document in hand. Behind him, a huge bookcase lined the wall, filled with folios. A radio perched on a table by Haruki’s side. Spread before the hearth was a sumptuous but faded oriental rug. The only light source was a green-tinted lamp on the desk.

Each time Klaus had turned up out of the blue, Haruki had experienced a powerful surge of emotions, the forefront of which was always relief and happiness. That had been the case even when Klaus appeared in the doorway of his office at the compound, his eyes carrying the memory of something awful that Haruki had already forgiven.

But now, powerful though the rush of emotions was, Haruki felt none of that same relief. What he did feel was something painful cresting against his ribcage; a bruise and a warning. It was the first time he had ever seen Klaus and wished he wasn't there.

Klaus’ heart gave a single loud thud at the look in his eye. A distrust he didn't think Haruki was capable of. A kind of coldness he had only seen Haruki display towards Aizawa and Nakamori, and Tachibana during the meeting when he had defied the emperor on Klaus’ behalf.

‘I may have underestimated Shoda’s plan,’ Klaus said, taking a slow step into the room. ‘There’s a small chance that hitting Tachibana tomorrow might not be the worst idea in the world.’

A clock ticked faintly on the wall. The golden and silver lines on the folio spines glinted here and there in the lamplight. Haruki mutely took in the fact that Klaus' clothes were damp and his hair was hanging a little lower than usual over his eyes. He stared for a long time before he spoke. 

‘What do you want, Klaus?’

His tone was wary – tired, almost – rather than angry. As though he had been drained completely and there was nothing left.

And yet, despite being confronted with resolute proof of how far he had pushed someone who had cared for him so deeply, Klaus found he almost revelled in it. He deserved all the hostility in the world. But he wouldn’t let that stop him. Nothing would stop him anymore. The colour that flooded Klaus just for being able to see him, to hear his voice and be alone in a room with him, was enough of a sign. All of the doubt he had felt when he spoke to Meiji no longer had any real bearing. None of it mattered in the face of the sudden conviction that he was, finally, exactly where he was supposed to be.

And just like that, he slipped into a skin he knew. His nerves disappeared along with his doubt.

‘Actually, a drink would be stellar.’ His eyes roamed about the room and landed on the far side of the study where there was a large antique cabinet. ‘And if I got the right gauge on Feulner…’

As Haruki watched in disbelief, Klaus walked to the cabinet and opened it. He made a small sound of triumph as he selected a bottle and examined the label. ‘I knew it. Probably the best brandy around for miles.’ He glanced at the rest of Feulner’s little collection. ‘No scotch though.’

A side door on the cabinet revealed rows of glasses and shot glasses. He picked out a shallow whiskey glass and poured out a generous amount of the golden-brown liquor, scent as strong as the colour.

‘Want one?’ he asked over his shoulder.

Haruki took a steadying breath and placed the report on the table beside the radio. He wondered why he couldn’t muster any real anger or even confusion. Why he should feel, of all things, distinctly humiliated. Every casual move of Klaus’ felt like he was being ground beneath his heel just a little more.

‘That was you earlier tonight, with the Fourteenth,’ he deduced, his tone still flat.

‘Yeah. They gave the boys from the capital a hell of a thrashing. Thought I’d help out while I was passing through.’

He picked up the glass and downed half the brandy in one hit. It burned pleasantly all the way down his throat.

Off to the left, he saw another door next to the bookcase that was partially open. Within, he glimpsed a dark room with a bed that looked like it had never been slept in.

Haruki tried to think clearly. He tried to ignore the wound that had reopened spectacularly.

‘They didn’t need your help,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have risked your life like that. There’s no need for you to be here anymore.’

‘Was that a hint?’

Haruki felt another surge of humiliation at the small smile Klaus threw him. A smile that said everything was a huge joke and he was about to deliver the punchline. It made Haruki recall things like wheat fields and a briefing where they discussed Shoda's coat and boots and a spar he had once glimpsed over the wall in the square over ten years ago. His insides twisted in confusion.

_Why are you here?_

‘I thought you’d gone back home,’ he said, relieved that he sounded guarded rather than wounded.

‘That was the plan. But then I thought I’d stick around for a little longer, if that’s okay.’

Klaus turned and leaned casually against the protruding ledge of the cabinet, drink in hand.

At that point, Haruki had had enough. He couldn’t be expected to understand any of it, any of the relentless pushing and pulling.

‘I haven’t slept in a long time,’ he said quietly, eyes on the rug before his feet. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’m –'

‘I heard you’ve been in love with me for ten years.’

Haruki’s ears rang in the silence, in that muffled silence unique to rooms that had books lining the wall. Klaus took another smaller sip, though his own pulse was beginning to betray him.

‘That’s a lot of pressure on me, you know,’ he said, his tone light and almost reproving. He tilted the glass and watched the brandy move within.

As Haruki stared, a disbelieving flush started to creep up past his collar. Klaus watched as colour claimed Haruki’s cheeks, which inspired a fresh, painful surge of emotion.

‘And that’s not all I heard.’

Klaus tossed back the rest of the brandy and approached slowly. In just a few steps, he had managed to make Haruki feel small again. His eyes gleamed in the low light with a new kind of danger.

‘I heard you had quite a time back in the west.’ Klaus reached around him to put his empty glass on the table by the radio, leaving a ring of condensation on the report Haruki had been reading. ‘How many men did you go through exactly?’

Haruki, stunned, took a fraction of a second too long to react and he found himself standing between Klaus’ arms, backed up against the table. Klaus’ scent was suddenly everywhere. And, like they had done once before, Klaus’ words had landed like whiplashes.

 _Ryoumei,_ he realised numbly, even as his mind fought to catch up, to understand what was happening. He suddenly wondered whether Klaus was on something again.

‘That's – that's enough –'

‘How many?’ Klaus repeated, eyes glinting above a calculating, wicked smile; entirely himself, but a side of him that Haruki hadn’t seen for a while. ‘Ryoumei said “more than a few”, which, really, could mean anything between two and twenty.’

The flush in Haruki’s face began to recede. In place of it, that cold hurt came back, glassing over his eyes. He turned away and tried to move out of Klaus’ hold.

Klaus took his arm and leaned his head closer to his ear. ‘Did you pretend they were me while they fucked you?’

Haruki didn’t recall making the decision to lash out. It was as though Klaus’ words, his tone, had transferred straight to his body, to his simple desire to get away. He twisted his arm from Klaus’ grasp and pushed it back sharply. His elbow caught Klaus in the ribs. It was a move that was almost wrote, learned in the refined conditions of a dojo and translating effortlessly. It was only after Klaus let go and staggered back with a grunt that Haruki realised he must have struck him where his wounds from Kolya were still tender.

By then, Haruki had already taken several steps away. His hurt was spliced through with guilt, immediate and visceral, over the fact that Klaus was hunched over slightly, a hand on his ribs and the other braced on the bookcase behind him. Haruki almost moved towards him again.

Then he heard Klaus’ chuckle. Incredulous and dry. It threw Haruki into disarray once more. He didn't think Klaus was capable of that much cruelty.

‘Why are you doing this?’ His voice was quiet, like it was being crushed beneath the weight of his confusion. ‘Why are you here? If you’ve only come to humiliate me…’

Klaus massaged his rib and straightened. Once again, he revelled in the guilt brought about by the very slight tremor in Haruki’s voice. Guilt over the words themselves, again proof of how far Haruki had been pushed. Guilt that Klaus leaned into, for the retribution he deserved.

But perhaps, he reflected sombrely, it was time for him to learn to stop punishing himself.

‘Haruki.’

His low, gravelly voice made Haruki’s head spin. He looked away, furious with himself, both lost and rooted to the spot, and ran an agitated hand through his hair.

In those few seconds, Klaus watched those errant strands riffle back over Haruki’s forehead. ‘I love you too, kid.’

It was clear that the words glanced off Haruki. Nothing changed on his face beyond the faintest flicker of confusion.

‘I’ve been nuts about you for months but I’ve been too much of an idiot to say anything.’

For the entirety of his ride to the capital, Klaus had room inside him only for that very specific adrenaline – a kind of simmering, undulating hope that he hadn’t felt in years, if ever – and he hadn’t spared any thought at all to what he would say. And so it all fell out him without any of the gravity it deserved. Without belying any of the pain that it took for him to get to where he was then.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t mean to.’ His veneer of detachedness threatened to crack just a little when he remembered the terrible things he had said. ‘Actually, I did mean to. But only because I thought I had to.’

Haruki felt sure that he had missed something important. Some vital clue that would have helped him understand what Klaus was saying.

‘I’m an idiot,’ Klaus repeated, heedless of how far behind he had left Haruki. ‘It’s the only thing that hasn’t changed in ten years.’

Too much.

It was too much, too soon, especially on the coattails of everything that had happened that night and in the past week. Enough to bring about that faint ringing in Haruki's ears again.

‘I don't – ’ Haruki finally said, aware of how thin his voice was. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You just want to hear me say it again.’

Klaus walked to him once more, still massaging his ribs, almost proud of Haruki for how much it hurt and how much the move had caught him off guard. He realised he ought to try to expel any latent paternal feelings he still had for the kid, especially given how quickly those feelings devolved into lechery.

And in fact, they threatened to do just that. He watched Haruki's expression slowly transform from incomprehension to a sort of numbness, a flushed daze, and it stirred up a familiar heat. A familiar hunger.

Despite how disoriented he was, or perhaps because of it, Haruki still tried to take a step back. Klaus didn’t let him.

‘Klaus –'

‘I love you,’ he repeated, his head and lungs filling with it, with that feeling of blinding afternoon sunlight, and only a fraction of it escaping through those simple words. He was mildly surprised at how easily and truly they formed in the air. And how quickly a far less honourable thought followed. ‘And if you ever let anyone else fuck you again, I don’t care if you’re pretending he’s me – I’ll make you watch as I kill him.’

Haruki had nowhere to turn. He had heard the words, all of them, and denial enveloped him fully. He fought for breath.

‘Understand now?’ Klaus pressed, his gaze merciless and his grip on Haruki’s arms too tight.

_No._

But Klaus’ lips were on his neck and his hands already pulling Haruki’s shirt tails free of his beltline, and Haruki fell hopelessly further into confusion. He gasped when he felt hands on the bare skin of his lower back. He felt distinctly like he was being submerged again, slipping underwater.

‘Wait…’

Klaus’ mouth latched onto his, his tongue a hot, familiar weight, his lips pushing Haruki’s apart further. Haruki tasted the bittersweet tang of brandy on Klaus' tongue. The taste of dried fruits. Flowers.

And then he understood, and he was both disappointed and relieved. He had fallen asleep at the desk behind them, courtesy of thirty-six hours straight of being awake. He would wake there, or perhaps back in his own office at the compound a few months ago and Kaiser would glance up at him and wag his tail, or maybe even back in his dorm at flight school years ago and he'd look over his shoulder where the man he met in a bar the previous night would still be asleep.

That conviction, the barrier between himself and the sight and sound and feel of Klaus removing his clothes, lifting him up and swinging him down in one move to the plush rug, was the only thing that let him move past the shock. To let his body respond to Klaus even as his mind receded.

When the tip of Klaus’ cock rubbed against him, looking for a way in, Haruki wondered why he gasped and quivered with anticipation; why it felt as though it was the first time.

Klaus could tell Haruki wasn't quite there. Despite the familiar motions of Haruki’s body, the dazed willingness of his hands and mouth, the glimmer in his eyes spoke only of a deep confusion. And Klaus knew ought to stop and let the kid catch his breath.

Instead, he pushed in. And loathed himself, just slightly, over how good it felt. How Haruki's arms wrapped about him and his body contracted and convulsed around the length of his cock as Klaus filled him. And how Haruki’s low, earnest moan sounded in his ear and filled him in turn.

He began moving, cleaving himself low over Haruki the whole time, feeling out the beats and pulses of Haruki's torso and neck, the changes brought about on his face with each thrust. And when he came, when Haruki's nails dug into his back and he followed suit, he thought he heard a faint and shaky _sama_ from beneath him, though he couldn't be sure.

Panting, sweat hanging from his fringe, Klaus slipped out of him but stayed where he was. He moved his arms one at a time to either side of Haruki's face, breathing in the scent that lifted from his body after sex. Haruki felt Klaus’ hands slide beneath his head, fingers in his hair, moving gently against his scalp. He stared at Klaus’ bare chest and arms.

He tried to focus. He couldn't help but notice that he hadn't yet woken up. And all of what Klaus said was beginning to come through to him, sometimes slowly and other times in startling, vivid little bursts.

Klaus stared into eyes that were wide and gentle and misted-over. Eyes that told him that he could do anything; he could win that whole goddamn war waiting outside. Haruki then lifted a hand to his face and Klaus leaned into his touch, his own eyes half-lidded. He heard Haruki say his name. And he realised suddenly, as he lay there on top of Haruki, that he was nervous again.

He had done everything. He had bared all. All that was left was Haruki's answer.

The room smelled like oak and leather. The rain that Klaus had ridden through earlier in the night had found the capital. It fell with a gentle insistence beyond the window. And Klaus stared and waited, wondering if he was about to hear it.

And suddenly, with all the effect of a stun grenade, there came a rap on the door. A wooden, jolting, alien sound.

‘Haruki-sama?’ a voice called, which took them both a few seconds to recognise as Colonel Tansho’s, newly appointed Grand Chamberlain. 'Are you awake, sir?'

Klaus hung his head in a very familiar and particular exasperation that had had a decade to build up. It was a scene he was utterly, utterly sick of. And so, before Haruki could answer, he raised his head and bellowed at the door.

‘The commander is having sex, Colonel! He’s indisposed. Come back in the morning.’

Beneath him, Haruki's face turned scarlet and the voice outside seemed momentarily dumbfounded.

‘I… I beg your pardon, sir?’

Klaus sighed and only barely managed to stop himself from repeating the same words.

‘The commander’s busy. What do you want?’

‘Uh… sir, we have word from the Bravo team of the twelfth infantry unit out in the western quarter…’

Still red, Haruki tried to sit up but Klaus wouldn’t move. His gaze was still on the door.

‘Well, what do they want?’

‘They’re reporting that a police patrol noticed the jeeps parked outside their location and interred them. Six of them, sir. The unit has changed positions before they were discovered but the vehicles have been taken in.’

Haruki tried to speak again, but Klaus had raced ahead.

‘Do the jeeps have any insignia that tie them to the Fifteenth?’

‘No, sir. But the Bravo team is six jeeps down. There aren't any left at the division. If we’re striking tomorrow –'

‘How many ambulances are left at the division?’

‘I’m not sure, sir.’ He sounded even less sure that he was talking to someone who wasn’t the commander.

‘Find out. There’s probably at least six. Strip them of med equipment and send them to the twelfth infantry in time for the strike.’

He glanced down at Haruki for the first time since the back and forth began.

‘That should do it, right?’ he asked quietly.

Haruki blinked and nodded. Klaus looked back up.

‘Anything else?’ he called to Tansho. Haruki stared at the way the strong muscles of his neck contracted when he spoke, the way his Adam’s apple moved.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then you’re dismissed.’

A deep hesitation was written into the ensuing pause. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I really would prefer to hear it from the commander himse–'

‘For fuck’s –’

‘You’re dismissed,’ Haruki said, finally finding his voice. ‘Carry out the orders as they’ve been relayed.’

‘Yes, sir.’ A voice that was the epitome of relief. Footsteps drew away from the door.

Haruki’s first impulse was to laugh. But he couldn’t. Ever since Klaus had barrelled into that study, he had completely lost his bearings. In fact, he was strangely grateful to Tansho. His jarring little interjection made the entire situation slightly less unlikely; more probable that he wasn't asleep at his desk or somewhere in the past.

And that Klaus had meant everything he had said.

‘I should have done that years ago,’ said Klaus with a smile, proud of his few seconds as Division Commander. ‘Not bad, huh?’

A casual arrogance that took Haruki back to a day Klaus had spun a brass handlebar in a sweeping arc before catching it again.

‘No,’ was again all Haruki could manage.

Klaus looked at him for a few moments before lowering his head and nuzzling the place where Haruki’s hair met his neck.

‘Guess I learned a thing or two from watching you and Taki over the years.’

His name was brought up almost by accident, without any sort of grave preamble, and for that reason it had even more of an impact. It brought them back vividly to that early morning in Klaus’ shed.

_If Taki were alive, it wouldn’t be like this. I wouldn’t have looked twice at you._

Klaus lifted his head.

‘Kid,’ he began slowly. ‘All those things I said before –'

When Klaus trailed off and hesitated, Haruki took his chance. Whatever Klaus was about to say, whether it would lift him to more dizzying heights or send him spiralling again, Haruki was sure he wouldn’t be able to handle it.

‘Klaus,’ he interrupted, staring at Klaus’ lips. ‘It’s not that I don’t –'

He struggled.

Klaus waited.

‘Can you please not say anything more?’ Haruki said weakly. Klaus realised only then how exhausted he sounded. ‘It’s just… it’s a lot to take in all at once.’

Eyebrows lifted, Klaus was caught in a strange braid of emotions. Surprise and tenderness and amusement, and even the faintest shred of disappointment. He couldn't help his slight grin.

‘Not the first time I’ve heard that.’

Haruki let out a soft, incredulous laugh. Quiet though it was, Klaus felt the sound take root inside him and blossom outwards. He suddenly wanted to hear it again. As many times as he could.

But Haruki’s eyelids were heavy. He was still flushed, still dazed, and Klaus saw, when he focused, all the signs that he hadn’t slept in days. It almost seemed as though he was too overwhelmed to meet Klaus’ eye as it was.

‘Okay, I’ll shut up,’ Klaus said gently. ‘Go to sleep, kid. You’ve done enough.’

As though he had been waiting for someone to say those words, Haruki stared for for only a few more seconds before he closed his eyes.

Despite Haruki’s paranoia that that moment would forever slip from his grasp once he was asleep, or that Klaus would be gone again by the time he awoke, he couldn’t fight his exhaustion for a moment longer. The soft, faded rug beneath him was suddenly the most supple place on Earth. In no time, Klaus was sure he was in a deep sleep.

Rolling onto his side on the rug, Klaus kept his face close to Haruki’s and stared at him. He was host to the strange and wonderful feeling that he was seeing Haruki for the first time. He remembered just how beautiful he was.

_You will want to deny him because of me. You must not._

And he thought about how deeply his master had cared for him. More than Klaus ever knew. It almost hurt him to think about it.

And then, when enough time had passed that the rain began to move further north and the ticking clock seemed loud, Klaus carefully lifted Haruki off the floor.

* * *

The softness of the rug had been replaced by something even softer. Haruki awoke what felt like days later, though it was still dark outside. He was still feeling lightheaded.

And Klaus was asleep next to him, arms wrapped about him tightly. In that moment of lightheadedness, Haruki felt each point of contact – the hands on his waist and shoulder, the forearms at his back. They were in the little bedroom leading off the study that Haruki hadn’t yet used. The desk lamp in the study was still on and silver light fell through the glass door leading to the balcony. The thick duvet was thrown back near the foot of the bed. Klaus had covered them with the thin white sheet beneath it.

Haruki breathed quietly. He tried to let everything in slowly, in a way that wasn't jarring. He couldn't.

The first fact that attacked him was that Klaus knew everything – or at least, whatever Ryoumei had told him. That knowledge rushed to his head along with a flare of humiliation. And then everything else flooded him, in one startling hit.

_I love you too, kid._

Haruki closed his eyes, brows knitting together just slightly.

Too much, too soon. Even after ten years of longing and months of sex, Klaus still managed to overwhelm.

He gently removed himself from Klaus’ hold and sat for a few moments on the edge of the bed. The clock on the nightstand said it was five in the morning. The strike would take place in less than five hours.

The world outside was still glossy and quiet with the memory of rain. The city unravelled before him, its skyline edged in darkness. Beyond it rose the lighter tint of mountains and a sky that was scattered with fewer stars than back at the division. Haruki stood on the small balcony, barely large enough for two, and tried to catch up. He tried to make it so that things would stop spinning about in his mind, things that didn't make sense crashing into yet more things that didn’t make sense. Things like what Klaus had said in his shed only days ago, before he left. And what could have happened in the interim to have resulted in all of this. He found it was helpful to stare at something still, like stars and the skyline.

Klaus wasn’t sure which came first; waking and noticing Haruki was gone or reaching his arm across the bed for Haruki and not feeling anything. Either way, he awoke.

‘Kid?’ he said, his voice slightly hoarse.

He heard movement behind him on the balcony.

‘I’m here.’

Klaus shifted and looked to his right. Haruki was leaning in slightly through the balcony door, a hand on the door handle, wearing an unbuttoned shirt over his briefs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing, just standing here. You should go back to sleep.’

‘Me? You’re the sleep-deprived one who has to order troops around in the morning.’

‘I slept. I feel a lot better, actually.’

‘Good.’ A small smile. ‘You should still come back to bed.’

Haruki hesitated. Again, he felt reality slipping out of his grasp. He didn’t trust it yet.

‘I will, in a bit.’

Klaus looked at him fondly. ‘Alone time. I get it.’

He settled back on his side, facing away. Even from across the short distance and in the meagre light, Haruki found himself staring at the strength and size of Klaus' biceps and the muscles of his back.

‘Hurry back, though,’ Klaus drawled sleepily over his shoulder. ‘If you’re going to be awake anyway, I want to fuck you at least three more times before the sun comes up.’

A hot flare raced through Haruki's body. He smiled and chuckled, again in a slight daze. In that moment, at the forefront of all else, he felt immensely lucky. He tried to turn back to the stars and skyline but they had suddenly lost their appeal.

* * *

Not long afterwards, Klaus felt the mattress behind him depress beneath a new weight.

‘That was fast,’ he said, eyes still closed.

Haruki took another moment to look at him. He knew there were a myriad of things left to talk about. He had to try to make Klaus help him understand. But the longer he sat there on the edge of that bed, he realised the only thing he was thinking about was whether he could touch Klaus the way he'd always wanted to.

He bent low and kissed the back of Klaus’ neck. After a pause, as though having expected a gruff refusal, he slowly pressed the front of his body against Klaus’ back. 

Klaus breathed deeply. Yet again, the feeling was new.

_But already I can see in him all of what I could not give._

Slowly, Haruki ran his hands over Klaus’ skin, over the taut muscles that were glazed with a fine light borrowed from the amber lamp in the study and the ghostly light from outside.

_I could never give myself to you the way you wanted. The way I wanted._

Klaus almost frowned. Now, suddenly, each time Haruki did something new, it was as though his touch was Taki apologising for something he had always wanted to do but never could. He fought the brief swell of emotions that rushed him then and tried not to think about it like that. He didn’t want to lose focus.

Haruki kissed the back of his neck again, and again a little higher near his ear. Klaus felt his warm breath moving his hair. He was content to lie there, letting Haruki’s lips and hands do what they wanted to his neck and back; passive, like he was soaking up rays of sunlight. It made him feel, pleasantly, as though he were a sleeping giant.

Then Haruki’s hand trailed over the muscles just above Klaus’ hips, looped around and grasped his half-hard cock, making it fully erect in seconds. Klaus let out a sound that was both sigh and groan. Haruki’s breathing got a little more ragged against the back of his neck. His hand worked its magic and his lips often returned to Klaus’ neck. He tightened his hand on the head of Klaus’ cock, sliding low to cup and squeeze his balls, before returning to his shaft. He drank in the grunts that came through clenched teeth and heard the loud drumming of his own pulse.

When he was close, Klaus finally moved. He grabbed Haruki’s wrist and Haruki caught the look he threw over his shoulder; a sharp, smouldering gaze.

‘I want to come somewhere else.’

Still lying on his side, he pulled Haruki’s wrist hard, dragging Haruki over his body onto the other side of the bed. Haruki felt the thrill of having roused the sleeping wolf; knowing he was about to be devoured.

In no time, he was gripping the sheets below his chin with his hips raised in the air, feeling a third finger being added, pushed deep inside, stretching him, making room for more.

‘You’re swallowing me up so greedily.’

With his free hand, Klaus reached beneath Haruki's legs and touched the tip of his cock which was leaking abundantly. Leaning forwards over Haruki, bracing his weight on his elbow beside Haruki's head, he pressed his lips to Haruki's ear.

‘Every word I say comes leaking out of your cock, doesn't it?’

Haruki moaned softly. When Klaus drew his tongue along the ridges of his ear, Haruki's whole body shuddered and he gyrated his hips forwards and back, taking in more of Klaus’ fingers with each pulse, wanting more of him inside.

‘Yeah, push back on my fingers,’ Klaus whispered, his breath hot in Haruki’s ear. ‘Just like that.’

With careful pressure, with a gentleness that was merciless at the same time, Klaus added his pinky and carved into him. Haruki’s moans intensified beneath him. With four fingers inside, Klaus could no longer go as deep as he wanted, but it was enough of a reward to feel that unearthly tightness moulding around his fingers, to feel the soft flesh of Haruki’s ass against his thumb.

And he wondered again.

Haruki felt the emptiness when Klaus withdrew. Eyebrows drawn, he glanced over his shoulder to see Klaus looming behind him, huge and imposing. Just as he thought of bracing himself, Klaus took his arm, pulled him upright and kissed him deeply. He then sat back and pulled Haruki onto his lap, a position which, Haruki had noticed before, Klaus was partial to. He nipped and licked along Haruki's jaw, his rigid cock rubbing against Haruki’s thigh.

‘How many?’ he asked suddenly.

Haruki, who had been focused on the size and feel of Klaus’ cock pressing against him, looked down in confusion.

‘How many wh–?’

But the look in Klaus’ eye made it clear. And it ignited a familiar anxiety. And another flare of resentment over Ryoumei’s small, poignant betrayal.

‘Klaus...’ he tried, his voice caught between a plea and a warning.

‘Just tell me.’

His tone, that time, was different. The question was suddenly sexual. A challenge. Klaus’ mouth was on his neck. Haruki’s mind was swimming again. He shivered. Hesitated.

‘Eight,’ he said, very quietly.

An easy tally. Each one lasting lifetimes in its own little bubble, whether hours or weeks. Each face its own, but each one bearing a single, irrevocable shortcoming. They were never the one he wanted.

The one who pulled back to look at him. ‘Eight?’

Haruki watched him nervously.

Klaus considered it. ‘Eight.’

His mouth found Haruki’s again and a warm hand closed around his cock. Haruki’s surprised moan was muffled at first but he arched his neck and it rang out.

‘That’s not too bad, I guess,’ Klaus slowly conceded, still trying to come to terms with it, with everything that simple answer entailed. ‘I expected worse.’

That brought about a disproportionate sense of relief. Haruki felt it mingle with the waves of pleasure generated by the hand slowly moving on his cock. He felt slightly bolder.

‘It was... hard to find anyone as tall as you.’

That brought about a hearty chuckle. Then there was a sudden flash of mischief in Klaus’ eyes. That dangerous gaze Haruki knew. Large fingers moved to his nipple and tweaked it slightly too hard to feel good. Haruki gasped and felt the sensation shoot straight to his cock.

‘What did you let them do to you?’ Klaus asked.

Haruki’s boldness disappeared. In fact, he felt a little afraid. He could no longer tell if it was part of the game or a question that would result in a jealous spell.

‘I… they…’

‘Did you suck their cocks?’ Klaus’ voice was a little strained, breathy. Still rumbling.

Haruki’s cock twitched in Klaus’ hand. ‘Yes.’

‘Did you swallow their come?’

‘Yes.’

Klaus grunted as he imagined it, the jealousy red-hot and searing and now fuelling a different part of his body. The hand on Haruki’s cock squeezed harder as it moved. ‘Did you let all eight of them fuck you?’

‘Hnn… yes,’ Haruki gasped.

Klaus bit his shoulder hard, revelling in the sharp cry. He let go of Haruki’s cock, almost as punishment, and ran both his hands over Haruki’s hips and waist and chest.

‘Did you imagine it was me the whole time?’

‘Yes.’

By then, Haruki too gone to start lying or covering up. He rubbed his dick against Klaus’ stomach, longing for his hand back, for friction, but Klaus’ hands were lower now, massaging the muscles of his ass.

He heard Klaus’ voice in his neck.

‘Hope I lived up to all that.’

There was nothing in his brazen, ironic tone that hinted at uncertainty, but Haruki wondered all the same. He let out a small chuckle.

‘You – none of them came even close...’

Klaus grinned into his collarbone.

‘Did you ever call out my name by mistake?’

Another nervous laugh. ‘No. But –'

And then Haruki froze.

Klaus felt it. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t nothing me. What were you about to say?’

‘I…’

Haruki had willingly admitted to letting numerous men have him, and having envisioned Klaus each time they did, but suddenly he couldn’t admit to this. It seemed far too intimate. Far too obsessive.

‘Tell me,’ Klaus insisted.

His mouth and tongue lingered near Haruki’s ear, trailing down his neck, as though Klaus knew that was the quickest route to disarming him.

And so, his eyes on the far wall, his voice small, Haruki said, ‘I… I made some of them... call me “kid”.’

Lips came off his neck. Klaus pulled back to look at him. Even in the darkness, Klaus could tell Haruki was blushing fiercely, looking away.

Klaus stared for a few more seconds in that strange new silence.

Then Haruki was thrown back on the bed and the breath knocked out of him. Arms were planted on either side of his head like trees and Klaus’ cock had pushed inside him all the way to the hilt. He didn’t even get to moan properly before Klaus was pistoning in and out the whole way.

‘Oh! Fuck, Klaus! _Yes!’_

The intensity in Klaus’ eyes almost scared him again. But he felt it, whatever emotion it was that was written in Klaus' gaze, take over his whole body. His teeth clenched and bared slightly, Klaus pushed Haruki’s left leg up and held it down over Haruki's right, until his legs were pressed together on the bed, his whole body angled sideways. Then Klaus plunged back in.

Held down, filled, moulded and twisted to Klaus' will, Haruki’s body no longer felt like his own. It felt like an extension of Klaus'. Utterly his.

* * *

Later, Klaus pulled him up off the mattress again, wrapping Haruki’s legs around Klaus’ hips once more. He slowed down, even though neither of them had come yet.

He licked Haruki's neck, tasting his scent and sweat. The feelings that rushed him from time to time were enough to leave him reeling. He could see why Haruki had needed a breather on the balcony.

He knew he had already overloaded the kid enough for one evening. But there was something important he hadn't yet said. Something reflected in Taki’s letter. A gratitude that he knew went deeper than words, but he had to try.

And so he paused, deep inside Haruki still, and stared up at him.

‘You know,’ he said, running his hands over Haruki’s back. ‘Before I came here, back at the cottage, I was rotting away. If it weren’t for you…’

The blue room that deepened with grief. The darkness of the pit, the talon clutch.

His voice was tight from the fact that he was still lodged inside Haruki, his body still squeezing down on him, and from the weight of what he was trying to say. In that moment, he understood the precise barriers that stopped Taki from expressing the same. Things that Taki had only been able to tell him through words on paper, long after he was already gone.

Haruki, breathing raggedly, tried to focus. Hearing words like that from Klaus again, in addition to having Klaus inside him, was yet again too much.

‘Klaus…’ he sighed.

Hearing his tone, Klaus’ grin flashed again. He shelved his attempt at words, for the time being, and thrust up once, hard, to hear Haruki moan.

‘Is something taking your focus away from my little confession?’

After another few thrusts, he picked up the momentum again. Haruki held onto his neck, crying out with every plunge. Klaus felt a familiar welling inside him, a liquid weight rising. And he recognised the quiver in Haruki's breathing.

‘Ready to come?’

Haruki’s hands were still on his neck and his head was filled with the words Klaus had said earlier, and the words he hadn't been able to get out. And it made more sense. Everything that had happened that day, and over the past year, became slightly clearer; certain details more vivid. And the more he understood, the more his chest tightened with a feeling that was almost painful. He moved one of his hands to the side of Klaus’ face.

‘Klaus,’ he said, in a high, urgent whisper. ‘I love you.’

If Klaus faltered, it was only for a moment that Haruki almost didn't notice. It was only in Klaus’ mind that everything seemed to pause when he heard those words.

He knew already.

He knew, just like he’d known with Taki for eight long years.

But hearing it made him realise how different hearing was to knowing. It became real. It became something outside them and between them. The words swam across the past ten years and he realised how much he’d needed to hear them.

And how much it meant, now, that they came from Haruki.

‘Look at me,’ he said, his gaze unwavering. ‘Keep your eyes on me. Don’t close them, even when you come.’

His body thrumming with the command, Haruki kept his eyes open as Klaus thrust into him, nearly crying from the effort. It had the strange of effect of making him think it was Klaus’ fierce yellow gaze that was delivering such exquisite pleasure, pleasure that mounted with each plunge.

Though tears now dotted his eyes, he managed to keep them open right up until the moment he came, spurting hotly between their bodies.

And then he felt Klaus shudder inside him. Klaus closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on Haruki’s shoulder, gasping for breath as he came.

Silence fell for a few seconds.

‘I told you... to keep your eyes open,’ Klaus panted.

Still floating down from his climax, Haruki managed a smile.

‘You couldn't do it either,’ he pointed out.

Klaus bit him on the shoulder again, hard enough to make Haruki gasp and jolt away.

‘Don’t disrespect your elders,’ he said in a low, tired rumble that made Haruki laugh between pants.

They had fallen back onto the bed, lying a little apart, still trying to recover their breathing, when Klaus said, ‘That’s one, by the way.’

‘One?’

Klaus’ eyes were closed. ‘We’re doing it twice more before the sun comes up.’

* * *

A few minutes before dawn, Klaus lay on top of him, having neglected to move off after their last round. He braced only some of his weight on his forearms. He breathed against Haruki’s neck and felt Haruki’s hands on his back. It was when they both threatened to drift off again that Klaus thought to ask whether he was too heavy. Haruki shook his head slowly.

‘Would have been better for my ego if you said yes,’ Klaus mumbled.

Haruki laughed again and Klaus let it envelop him freely. He was slowly learning to do so.

It had almost caught up with them both, in separate ways, by then. For Klaus, the existence of Taki’s letter, all that it had meant for Klaus and Taki and all their years together – and all that it could mean now, freely, for Klaus and Haruki – had solidified just that much more. For Haruki, the weight of everything Klaus had said and done that day was just on the cusp of feeling real.

And with that came a strange, simmering new anxiety, all on its own. One that he had felt countless times before but never quite like like this.

‘Klaus?’

‘Hm?’

‘If – if I asked you to stay behind during the strike, would you stay behind?’

Klaus opened his eyes. ‘Why?’

There was a pause in which Haruki realised he wasn't sure where exactly they were. How much he could say.

‘I'm scared I'll lose you,’ he said at length, in a voice so steeped in self-consciousness that Klaus' heartbeat spiked for a moment before settling again. ‘After all this time, after tonight,' he said, voice weakening even more in tandem with a slight blush, 'it just seems –'

 _Too good to be true,_ Klaus thought with a twinge he hoped wasn't prescient. He had said the same thing to Taki once.

‘I’m worried that something might happen to you tomorrow. I just... want to keep you safe.’

He heard how pathetic and immature those words were. Words that weren’t befitting of a commander. Words that Taki would never have said. And although he was right on that count, he didn’t know they were words that Taki had thought, in silence, almost every day as commander. It was the very same fear that moved Taki to give up everything he knew and bring Klaus away to the west.

To his surprise and relief Klaus smiled gently, eyes crinkling in the corners.

Klaus had heard his own fears reflected in his commander's words. He realised that perhaps Meiji was right. Perhaps it was a burden, a curse, that they all shared. Everyone who was in their world.

He lifted his head and kissed Haruki on the forehead through his hair. ‘I'll stay if you want me to,’ he said carefully. ‘Even though it'll make me feel like Kaiser.’

Haruki smiled, a little embarrassed again.

‘But I want to be there with you tomorrow.’

Klaus' words were gentle but the hint was clear. And Haruki even wondered if he heard something of the future in them which left him breathless once more. He touched Klaus’ cheek, fingertips at his temple.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘So I can come?’

Haruki nodded.

Klaus was on the point of promising Haruki that he would be fine. That if Haruki was the one to call him, he would blaze through anything in his way. But it was war, and he knew he couldn't promise any such thing. Just like he couldn’t be sure whether his being there was, in some way, a threat to Haruki. He couldn’t be sure whether simply talking to Meiji had condemned his curse to the world of superstition or not.

Though he couldn’t make any promises, he did try his hand at divulging a recent suspicion. His tone lightened considerably.

‘Besides, I think I’ve figured out my god-given strength. Turns out I can't die,’ he said with a small flourish.

Haruki raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’

‘I’m pretty sure the gods personally see to it that I get out of every close shave you can think of. All the evidence points that way, anyway.’

He lifted a corner of his mouth at the thought and Haruki smiled too, wishing he could believe it.

‘I have a feeling it’ll take me to kill me,’ Klaus continued airily.

 _And you saved me from that,_  he thought but didn't say.

‘Or maybe Kolya,’ he added darkly after a pause.

Haruki chuckled, but his smile faltered when he touched the place on Klaus’ jaw where the bruise had almost faded. He was on the point of apologising for Kolya once more. And then he remembered with a slight shock that he had struck Klaus in the ribs only a few hours ago and almost made him double over. He opened his mouth to apologise for that, too.

But feeling Klaus’ weight on him, the pillows infused with his scent, his tanned skin and gold hair taking up almost his entire field of vision, Haruki couldn’t bring himself to darken the mood again. There was more to ask and more to say but, for now, there was more than enough. More than he had ever dared to hope for.

It was Klaus, he thought.

Klaus.

In his bed.

With a sigh, Klaus rolled onto his back and pulled Haruki with him.

Dawn slowly leaked through the thin curtain. The world outside awoke for a day that hadn’t yet been written. And as Klaus held Haruki, he realised it had taken a while for him to realise that the room was glazed with that same dim, ethereal blue light of dawn that had haunted him for years. And that it was now nothing more than light.


	64. The Country's Heart

Memories of those small hours, both the ones steeped in moonlight and darkness and the ones touched by the pale light of morning, stayed with Haruki as he prepared for the strike.

In the shower, he remembered waking with his head against Klaus’ chest.

As he reached for the towel, he remembered how Klaus' hands moved from his lower back all the way up to his neck.

As he put on his uniform, he remembered how Klaus ran his fingers through Haruki’s hair almost tenderly while Haruki took almost the full length of Klaus' cock into his mouth. Klaus’ touch was gentle enough that Haruki was sure he was holding back.

And in fact, Klaus had been doing just that. He was dragging out the sensation as much as he could, forcing himself to administer a light touch, testing his own powers of restraint, as he was worked over by the heat of Haruki’s mouth, the dexterity of his tongue and lips and hands.

‘Yeah, suck that dick, kid,’ he encouraged in a low hiss. ‘Fuck. You’re way too good at that.’

He brushed Haruki’s hair back from his face just to watch it flip back over his forehead in artful waves. Beauty above contrasting perfectly with the lust and wantonness not far below. When enough time passed, he finally grabbed hold of Haruki’s head in both hands and held him still, his grip strong enough to make Haruki moan around his cock.

‘I’m going to fuck your throat. You ready?’

Haruki blushed as he finished doing up his buttons and clipping his black shoulder strap onto his belt. He checked his reflection only briefly in the mirror hanging in the wardrobe. He knew he ought to be thinking about what was coming ahead, but thoughts of Klaus — his words, his hands, his gestures — constantly invaded plans for offensives and counter-strikes and the need to keep an eye on both the impending attack against the capital and the need to continue holding their ground further where Tachibana’s focus was.

He glanced at the shining silver insignia on the shoulders of his uniform; the ones that had glinted in the sun whenever he spied Taki stroll across the compound with his knight only a few steps behind him, and it reminded him of the gravity of the job he had to do.

In that moment, though he didn’t know it, Klaus too was thinking of Taki.

Haruki saw that Klaus was no longer in the bedroom by the time he stepped out of the en suite, nor in the adjoining study. He only found him when he made his way to one of the large halls of the embassy that served as their operations base where all of his officers had gathered and were murmuring among themselves and giving orders to subordinates to ready their units. Kolya was there, as were Shoda and Hasebe, and even Izumi Shunsuke.

Tansho, when asked whether he had seen the captain, gestured towards one of the many doors leading to the grand balcony.

_There is a smile on your face that I know well but have not seen in recent memory._

Klaus took a deep drag on his cigarette and observed the same view Haruki had seen the night before. But even as he stared out over the rooftops of the city at the mountains in the distance, he was seeing only lean, flowing script. The letter was folded carefully in his front pocket again but he didn’t need to see it to be able to picture the words. He wondered if he would ever come to terms with the intricacies of every little thing it contained.

Despite their eight years together, Klaus had no idea that Taki had picked up on such details. Things about Klaus that he didn’t know himself. It left him with a strange feeling; a sort of embarrassed humility and gratitude. The letter spoke of a smile of his, of Klaus’, that Taki had known. Known enough to recognise it when Haruki arrived.

Haruki remembered just as he pushed the door open and spied Klaus smoking against the bannister that he had just left the same hall in which Feulner had thrown his final soiree, and that the balcony was where Haruki had found Klaus that night.

_In only a few days, young Haruki has lifted my burden._

Klaus looked up as the door opened.

‘There he is,’ he said warmly. He took another long pull on his cigarette, his gaze simmering. ‘Ready to dethrone the hell out of the emperor?’

As Haruki approached, a smile slowly breaking across his face, he realised a part of him had been worried that everything that had happened in that small study and bedroom would be somehow erased in the light of day. The way Klaus looked at him dispelled those fears and made his stomach flip at the same time.

‘I spoke to Hasebe and a few of the others,’ Klaus went on. ‘Looks like a solid plan. I heard you moved out some of the tanks to the southern district.’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki said, turning to subconsciously stare south where Onokami and some of the other tanks were being moved. ‘The palace is already heavily guarded but Tachibana doesn’t know how many of our forces have been mobilised around the city. Hopefully we’ll all be in good positions to attack by the time he realises.’

The plan was to hit police headquarters and armed forces in the capital so Tachibana had no immediate defence within the city itself. That included a few battalions and an armoured regiment in the south.

‘The only base with numbers we have to worry about is a brigade outside the city limits, but some of the _Hitobito_ is on standby in case they’re deployed.’

His gaze shifted further north where the palace was. ‘The First Infantry Regiment will most likely move to protect the palace as soon as we start but as long as the others are all subdued, they won’t be able to put up much of a defence. Then hopefully Tachibana will surrender.’

As Klaus listened to him speak and watched his eyes take on their familiar intentness as they roamed over the city, he fought a sudden, inopportunely timed wave of desire. He thought of how he had held Haruki’s body to him in as many ways as he could think of in the early hours. He stared at the single hickey that was just visible above his collar; a wayward bite.

Idly pleased with himself and still feeling that tug of desire, he thought about the rest of that day.

‘And I assume you’re taking on the armoured regiment in the southern district.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then that’s where I’m going too.’

Haruki met his eye and smiled after a small pause. For no reason, he felt an odd palpitation in the base of his throat. He remembered a thought he had once had as a cadet. How, despite his confusing muddle of thoughts and reveries, he was surprised to find that Klaus’ eyes really were that gold.

‘I thought,’ he said, and cleared his throat so it would be less embarrassingly husky. ‘I thought maybe you’d be against all this. Everyone inside is still pretty nervous. We have just enough manpower to hit each target, and probably not enough to take over the palace if Tachibana doesn't surrender…’

‘There's not much we can do about it now. You had to move as soon as you made the announcement to the whole division, there’s no way word wouldn’t reach Tachibana after that.’

‘I know, but…’

Haruki hesitated. He didn't know how to ask how much, exactly, Klaus disapproved of their strike today. He wondered whether he really wanted to know.

Klaus blew smoke. ‘Worst case scenario is we’re at a stalemate for a long time, either until Motohara sends back the rest of our boys from the Western Front, or until Tachibana gets the rest of the army to come in and steamroll us all. Whichever comes first.’

Haruki almost laughed. ‘That's a pretty bad case worst case.’

In the pause that ensued, Klaus looked at him closely. He thought about Shoda and his steely, enigmatic rationale which reminded him of how Hans used to speak.

‘It wasn’t just Shoda sweet-talking you? You said you wanted to do this now because of a gut feeling?’

Haruki nodded.

‘Then I trust it,’ Klaus said simply. ‘I trust you.’ After a pause, he added, ‘On the plus side, at least Tachibana won’t be pushing his men to use nukes here. Too close to his own skin.’

He didn’t notice the impact that his first few words had on the commander. After taking a final drag of his cigarette, he flicked it over the railing.

‘This is the same balcony, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly. ‘Outside Feulner’s party. You came out here to find me.’

‘Yeah, it is,’ said Haruki, surprised and strangely happy that Klaus remembered.

As Haruki began to move back towards the doors, Klaus remembered that moonlit night. Haruki’s glossy black vest and the little brass airplanes at his wrists.

Remaining where he was, throwing a quick glance at the doors to make sure the curtains shielded them from view, Klaus reached for Haruki’s waist and pulled him back towards the railing. He kissed the young commander deeply and forcefully enough that he was bent very slightly backwards over the bannister.

When Klaus released him, he was gratified to see Haruki’s flushed face and the colour slowly returning to his stunned lips.

‘Should have done that back then,’ he remarked lightly.

Haruki carried the memory of his lips, his simple words, and the gleam of his long, glossy scar in the sunlight, when they rolled out of the embassy not long after that. He was in a jeep and Klaus rode alongside. They didn’t meet any resistance until they reached the outskirts of the city where a few of the tanks from the Eighth Armoured Regiment had deployed, alongside infantry units, to meet the sudden, hostile approach of tanks bearing the triple-leafed rose.

The streets they passed already bore the beginnings of debris; trampled streetlamps and broken sidewalks. They heard the sound of a missile booming out of a canon, impacting against something metallic. Another one appeared to have hit part of a building; the rumbling landslide of brick followed.

Haruki ordered the jeep to stop where they were, civilians hurried past to evacuate the city limits. Men funneling their families out of buildings, cars streaming past, women clutching bundles that may have been unpacked clothes or children. Haruki saw it all while he waited for a report from his tanks.

‘Cat’s out of the bag, looks like,’ Klaus said as he drew up beside the jeep and lifted his goggles. ‘Will you be okay getting to Onokami?’

‘Azusa and the crew know we’re coming,’ Haruki replied, just as he switched off the radio. ‘The other tanks will cover us as we board.’

Klaus looked at Kolya who sat on Haruki’s right in the jeep. ‘Don’t let him out of your sight. Got that?’

Though Kolya’s head inclination could barely be considered a nod, Klaus took comfort in it.

‘By the way, Meiji-sama says hi,’ Klaus added to Kolya flippantly. ‘He asked me to say so, late last night. Just as I was leaving his bedroom.’ He turned to Haruki. ‘Stay on the air, kid. I’ll clear the way for you.’

He flashed Haruki a quick wink, pulled his goggles back over his eyes and tore off down the road before Kolya could process what he had said.

Haruki kept his eyes on the bike until it was lost from sight, anxiety and hope and guilt and love pulsing as one in the pit of his stomach.

He then turned and a short laugh escaped him at the look on Kolya’s face.

* * *

The strike began more or less as planned. Reports started coming into headquarters here and there, over the course of a confused hour or so, that there was suspicious movement near defence bases in and around the city.

But the attack was based on a tightly wound simultaneous strike that Shoda had delivered once before and Haruki had expanded upon. When the order came, it felt to the capital much like they were being engulfed in one hit. Several bases, both battalions and regiments, were suddenly under fire. Police headquarters was surrounded and subdued in no time. The defence forces put up a stronger fight, but even they were calling headquarters for back-up.

Back-up which headquarters simply didn’t have. More than half of each of their battalions and brigades were fighting on the Western Front. And so focused were they on subduing the rogue division to the south — and what now appeared to be at least two rogue divisions — that they didn’t see an attack at close range coming.

Caught almost completely off-guard, the first two battalions were overwhelmed by the forces that came down upon them, and they were subdued with only a handful of casualties.

A third battalion, however, was surprisingly well-prepared. Their commander had been plagued by intuition for several days leading up to the attack and had all of his men armed to the teeth and ready.

But in less than an hour, despite heavy losses, the combined forces of the _Hitobito_ and factions of the army including the Fifteenth which had joined the revolution, surrounded them and forced them to lay down weapons. The commander waited in his office, upright and ready to fall upon his sword for his emperor and his country and his honour. But as the footsteps thundered up the stairs, drawing closer as surely as the moment itself, he was shocked and ashamed to find he was unable to go through with it.

The men of the _Hitobito_ opened the door to find him crouched on the floor and sobbing beside his katana.

In the war room of the Imperial Palace, mouth dry, Tachibana listened incredulously to the reports as they rolled in. It was as though the revolution had sprung out of the very soil in his own backyard and was tearing down everything he had built. He disappeared without a word into his office. General Nakamori’s replacement, a newly promoted general by the name of Koyama, was left white-faced.

‘Double the guard around the palace,’ he ordered to the Imperial Guard.

‘From… from where, sir?’ the head of his Imperial Guard dared to ask.

‘From anywhere!’ Koyama almost snapped. ‘Anyone who is left!’

‘Everyone in the city is under fire, sir. And the ones outside will take hours to get here.’

‘Get me on the phone with the First Infantry Regiment and the Police Commissioner.’

The first was obtained easily enough, and a strained phone call ensued where the commander of the infantry regiment agreed to send everyone he could and would be there within the hour.

The call to the Police Commissioner, however, never made it through.

Inside Onokami, Haruki heard clipped reports of all victories and then yet more; two reports which were the most heartening news of all. A small army base, known as the Chrysanthemum Regiment in deference to the symbol of Meiji’s house, had heard of the attacks across the capital and they had waited, arms already lain down, in order to ask to join the fight on the other side.

Azusa had more good news.

‘We have police headquarters, sir. And in fact, the Police Commissioner is saying he will be ordering a ceasefire of all police forces.’ Azusa looked at him with a daring smile. ‘He says we won’t face any interference from his men.’

Haruki gave a short exhale of relief. It was a sweet surprise when they encountered allies they didn't know they had.

The Eighth Armoured Regiment, however, continued to mount its defence against the invaders from within. Haruki ordered warning blasts where he could, to land at the feet of dismounted troops, and grimly gave the shoot-to-kill order whenever warnings weren't enough. He tried not to think abstractly, in terms of how many lives and families had been destroyed, and might not have been, if those same men happened to follow a brigadier or colonel or commander who had simply chosen a different side.

He tried telling himself that such questions were the root of all conflict, both intrinsic to the game and somehow irrelevant. He charged ahead and was almost unaware of the little prayers he left in Onokami’s wake.

Just as he wondered where Klaus was and whether he ought to cave to his paranoia and radio through to him, his voice came through on the speakers.

_‘Wolfpup. You reading me?’_

‘Yes,’ Haruki said at once. ‘Are you alright?’

_‘Peachy. You’re clear to the regiment itself. I did a quick patrol past their gates, they’ve still got some serious firepower on reserve. If our boys elsewhere in the city are sitting around gloating over their wins, I reckon call them up.’_

‘Roger that,’ Haruki replied before he called in for back-up from Shoda and units from other divisions.

As Onokami powered on towards the enemy regiment, they suffered a few rumbles when hand-grenades were blasted near its tracks, but, as Klaus promised, they didn’t face any real threats. All anti-tankers within range had already been taken out.

Just after they fired their way past the infantry units, their tanks came into view. Newer models, faster and sleeker than Ferdinands with far more firepower.

And none of which stood any chance against the state-of-the-art anti-tank missiles that wheeled into formation in front of Onokami, courtesy of Emmerich von Wolfstadt and the Western Alliance.

Onokami blasted through what was left by the time the anti-tank missiles had done their part.

It took just under an hour for the armoured regiment to surrender. Facing the canons of Onokami and three of her counterparts as well as freshly mobilised troops, both army and _Hitobito_  from elsewhere in the city, the commander had no choice but to declare defeat.

From near the gates of the regiment, Klaus paused with a foot on the ground. He spied Haruki lift the hatch, arm outstretched, as his men stormed the regiment. The commander watched to ensure his men would be granted safe passage into their base.

After closing the hatch, Haruki caught Kolya’s eye for a brief, poignant moment.

 _‘Well done, kid,’_ Klaus’ voice said through the speakers.

Haruki smiled. ‘You too,’ he said.

He allowed himself a only a small interlude of relief and triumph. Onokami turned and continued on towards the palace. He heard the roar of a bike doing the same.

* * *

Onokami carved through the city streets towards the palace, sometimes slowly, sometimes at a pace that made adrenaline course through to Haruki’s fingertips.

Elsewhere in the nation, the forces deployed by Tachibana made their way towards the capital and, more often than not, were accosted by regiments and divisions of their own army before they had even reached the capital.

The only attack that Haruki knew would pose a serious problem were those that came by air.

Klaus’ sharp eyes spotted them first.

_‘Trouble in the sky, Commander.’_

Haruki’s gaze instinctively lifted skyward, even within the tank, when he heard the distant drones.

‘Take cover, Klaus. We’ll be fine.’

 _‘Roger that,’_ Klaus said grimly before veering away.

Even for the pilots and gunners in the air who were used to seeing clear distinctions between friend and foe, between army and _Hitobito,_ didn’t know which way to train their guns. And without clear instructions from headquarters, who were still struggling to get a grip on which divisions had turned and which hadn’t, their options were limited indeed.

Nevertheless, the heavy machine gunfire and bombs they dropped managed to cause damage to all beneath them.

Haruki spied the oncoming barrage of bullets, lifting dust and fine debris from the ground as it tore like lethal rain from the sky, heading straight for the tank.

‘Brace!’ he called.

Onokami took each quick puncture wound as the plane dipped and took off again above the street. Haruki was rattled and felt each vicious drumbeat rattle through him. He could tell the top of the tank, possibly even the canon had taken a bad hit. But nothing came even close to piercing Onokami’s thick hide.

They moved on with barely a lurch and a smile crossed Haruki’s face when he remembered his spirited defense of what Ryoumei had once called oversized beetles. Ryoumei himself had been left behind at the division; given his minimal combat training, Haruki had refused to let him join the fight.

‘Give me a plane and I’ll finish the revolution in five minutes,’ he had grumbled to himself.

Still half-smiling at the memory, Haruki asked Azusa to patch through to Klaus to make sure he had evaded the airborne attack.

‘Yes, sir.’

That was when Haruki spied, through the periscope, a strange shape on the road up ahead. A pile of rubble on the sidewalk, blasted off the corner of the building by the heavy cannon attack from above, and a motorcycle tyre protruding from the ruins. Rubber and metal and grey brick.

The sight sliced through him like a blade. Haruki forgot to breathe.

Azusa, who had been focused on the dials before him, caught the look on Haruki’s face out of the corner of his eye. He was surprised to see him suddenly look so pale.

‘Sir?’

Haruki didn’t seem to hear him. And then, to Azusa’s surprise, he opened the hatch above him without any warning or indication to the rest of the crew. The roar of distant planes was still audible.

‘Sir!’

His mind full of the image he had seen through the periscope, being supplanted by the real image on the street before him, Haruki was close to pulling himself out of the tank.

 _‘Commander,’_ Azusa insisted, almost rising from his seat. ‘I got through to the captain. He’s having trouble with his radio. He says his sidecar was hit by debris.’

Haruki blinked again, finally tearing his eyes away from the road. ‘What?’

After few seconds of only static, another drone sounded, superimposed over the distant ones in the air. Klaus’ wheeled around the corner, hair flying, his sidecar crumpled in on one side.

Klaus stopped by Onokami’s right track, surprised to see it had stopped and even more surprised to see Haruki half out of the hatch.

‘What’s wrong?’ he called up.

Relief cascaded on Haruki heavier than the bricks atop the bike — a bike, he realised, which had most likely simply been parked there.

‘Nothing,’ he called back. He realised that on the heels of his ridiculous panic, he was he was still, even more ridiculously, fighting the urge to climb out of the tank.

‘Then close the hatch,’ Klaus said. ‘The planes are still sniffing around.’

‘Your sidecar –’ Haruki began. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’

Klaus had weaved out of the way of the airborne attack but his head had begun to rattle again, still the lingering effects of a shell blast that was over a week old. His momentary slip in focus had cost him the sidecar and radio.

‘Just a small chunk of falling building hitting the sidecar,’ he said nonchalantly, even as his head pulsed. ‘Going to need you to rig the radio up for me all over again when we get back. No comms from me for the rest of today, sorry kid.’

‘That’s okay. Stay close.’

‘Sir, yes sir,’ Klaus said with a smile, just to see Haruki’s reaction.

Even after Haruki dropped out of sight and Klaus revved the bike up again, he wondered if he had imagined the strange look on Haruki’s face when he first drew up to the tank. As he zipped ahead of Onokami down the battered street, he glanced a motorcyle tyre not unlike his own sticking out from under a heavy pile of bricks. He raised his eyebrows.

* * *

The city was taken. All possible bases were subdued and every man who wore the uniform for Tachibana was arrested. Some fought until the end. Those who were less geared towards honour than self-preservations tore off that very same uniform and joined the outflux of civilians leaking away from areas that had come under fire. Even the airplanes returned to base when headquarters found that just as many of their men as the rebels were being hit.

All that was left was the palace.

As Haruki and Shoda had predicted, the First Infantry Regiment had the whole palace tightly defended; each entrance, the bridge, both sides of the moat. With the rest of their forces occupied elsewhere, Haruki had enough to surround the palace but not enough to storm it.

Onokami reached it at the same moment as the jeep bearing Shoda and his men. Haruki climbed out of the tank and Klaus helped him off the tall track. For Haruki, only Klaus' wide smile allowed the simple fact to sink in that perhaps they had won. For a moment or two, even after he was on the ground, Haruki's hands remained on Klaus’ jacket.

‘A glorious day for the people, wouldn't you say?’ Shoda said as he approached with some of his men.

Haruki let go of Klaus and turned. Kolya landed on the ground nearby.

‘I wouldn't yet,’ Haruki said guardedly, still remembering the terrified looks on civilians’ faces as they fled. ‘It doesn't look like Tachibana's ready to give in.’

‘On the contrary, we’ve received word back at the embassy that his new Defence Minister is on the phone for you, eager to negotiate a surrender.’

Haruki didn't say anything for a few seconds. When the words sank in, he allowed himself a tight smile that didn't belie the magnitude of his relief. Klaus saw this brief flicker on Haruki's face in profile and his heart swelled with pride.

‘My men and I can keep an eye on the palace here,’ Shoda went on. ‘Be sure to give them nothing when you negotiate. That's the first rule of negotiation, after all.’

‘Shouldn't I stay here and you discuss the surrender with Tachibana? After all, the _Hitobito_ is –’

‘Did you not just hear my take on negotiations?’ Shoda remarked with a self-deprecation that was somehow still suave. ‘You're far more suited to this final step than I. At this point, I simply like to think of myself as your most valuable right-hand man.’

‘Easy,’ Klaus warned.

Shoda smiled at the captain’s wary gaze.

‘Second-most valuable, then. But let's not split hairs.’ He gave Haruki a look that seemed to glimmer in his eyes. ‘The point is that the day is ours, Commander. And the revolution is yours.’

* * *

Victory was the most powerful of aphrodisiacs.

Klaus swung the bedroom door open heavily with Haruki’s hands still on his neck and the front of his jacket, their mouths locked, tongues seeking one another, seeking more.

Despite the fact that Tachibana hadn’t yet handed over his reign, it was enough to know that it was so close within their grasp, and to think of how much else had been fortuitous that day.

Haruki impatiently undid Klaus’ jacket and peeled it off his shoulders. By the time it fell to the floor, he was already undoing the knot of Klaus’ tie. He pulled it off with such force that it burned the skin around Klaus' neck.

With a low, rumbling growl that started in his chest, his head spinning over the mere fact of Haruki's impatience, Klaus pulled him close and hoisted him up onto his hips. A little surprised, Haruki had to forego his attempts to remove Klaus’ clothes.

Klaus kissed him, hands firmly on the undersides of his thighs, and lost himself in the feel of Haruki's mouth. The hands in his hair. He bore Haruki's weight, heavier than Taki's, a pleasant strain on the muscles of his arms and back. The throbbing in his head since the airborne attack finally began to ebb. He wondered if it was the low light of that small room.

He pulled back slightly.

‘You thought I bit the dust today, huh?’

His lips curled into a smile at the look that crossed Haruki's face.

‘I told you, didn't I? The gods won't let me die.’

His smile dimmed when Haruki brought his hands to his face with a strange urgency in his eyes. Fingers traced his scar.

Haruki stared at Klaus’ broad lips. His strong jaw. He lowered his head and kissed his mouth again. Gently. Klaus lifted his chin and responded.

And then Klaus suddenly flung him backwards onto the bed. Winded, Haruki had only enough time to lift onto one elbow before Klaus leaned over him, one foot still on the ground, hands on either side of Haruki's body and his knee digging into the bed.

Haruki stared up at him for a few seconds, breathless, and wondered at how he could feel so overwhelmed even when no part of Klaus touched him.

‘Strip,’ Klaus ordered quietly.

Ears ringing with that single word, chest heaving, Haruki hesitated for only a second longer before his hands moved to the belt at his waist. He undid it and his shoulder strap came off at the same time. The silver insignia came off too, to fall with his jacket in a slump on the side of the bed.

Klaus didn't move an inch the whole time, watching the commander undress within the cage created by his arms and body. He hovered and watched as Haruki revealed his body to him of his own accord. Shoulders and long, toned torso. Long legs. Face flushed as though he was doing it for the first time.

And then finally, Haruki lay completely naked and breathing heavily beneath him, skin tingling, feeling utterly exposed. His cock was painfully hard. Golden eyes grazed every inch of him. And still Klaus didn't make any move to touch him. This was despite his knowledge that time was pressing; that Haruki would be needed back in the operations hall for when Tachibana’s call came through.

Over the next few charged seconds, Klaus lowered himself just slightly, his hair hanging low enough to brush Haruki’s forehead.

‘You know I love you, right?’

Something in the way he said it. Some kind of danger there.

‘Yes,’ Haruki said, though he sounded uncertain.

‘Good.’ Klaus lifted up and spoke slowly so Haruki would feel the impact of each word. ‘Turn around, lift your ass in the air and spread it wide with your hands.’

Haruki’s breath left him again. After a moment or two where he stared at the look on Klaus’ face — a resolute, unmovable lust — he complied. He closed his eyes against the sheets as he opened himself to Klaus.

‘Wider.’

Haruki obeyed. He pulled until it was almost painful. He was also aware of the small, gasping moans coming out of him without Klaus even having touched him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Klaus peeling off his own shirt. Unbuckling his belt. Taking his time. Haruki clenched his eyes shut.

And suddenly a strong hand gripped one of his cheeks, fingers digging hard into his flesh, lips and stubble at his hole, and Klaus’ tongue pushed into his body.

 _‘Ah!_ Oh, fuck!’

As Klaus’ tongue probed deep into Haruki, his chin pressing into his flesh, Haruki made the mistake of lifting himself up, still without the use of his hands, to look over his shoulder.

Klaus straightened and pushed his head back onto the bed.

‘Did I tell you you could look back?’

He resumed where he left off as Haruki moaned softly against the sheets. He kept his face close, carefully inspecting that private, soft, pulsing part of Haruki, watching precisely how it made room for his fingers. His tongue darted out to run across the hole, feeling its ridges. He breathed deep that scent that was much stronger than the sweet musk elsewhere on Haruki’s body and several times more intoxicating.

Haruki didn’t know why it caught him so off guard when Klaus’ cock thrust in, or why he was surprised when the force of his thrusts were so strong that he was forced to let go of his ass cheeks and cling to the duvet beneath him, holding it to his chest and feeling tears sting his eyes.

‘Klaus!’ he cried. ‘Klaus, yes! Mmmh, deeper! Ugh, deeper –’

Klaus reached down and pulled Haruki’s hair back roughly, hearing him gasp, and thrust in further — a single, ruthless plunge — and held himself there.

‘Like that?’

‘Ugh! Ah, yes!’

As he remained still, he felt Haruki trying to buck against him.

‘You trying to fuck yourself on my cock there, Wolfpup?’ he said hoarsely.

Haruki whimpered, his cheeks and neck blazing.

‘You going to keep doing that? Or do you want me fuck you?’

‘Fuck me,’ Haruki whispered at once, tears hanging on the corners of his eyes. ‘Please…’

Klaus clenched his teeth and pulled Haruki’s hair back again as he began thrusting, using the full length of his cock as ordered, relishing the fact that Haruki craved it. Craved him. Longed for Klaus to invade him so deeply and thoroughly. He felt Haruki’s climax through the shuddering moan and the contractions of his body. He reached below Haruki’s body and squeezed his cock as he came, feeling his come trickle between his fingers.

He then spun Haruki around and lay him flat on the bed. When he bent down to kiss him, the hardness of his mouth and hands suddenly gave way. His lips were almost gentle again. Almost careful. Even through the numbness of his climax, Haruki registered Klaus’ shift in gears. Their lips were a little apart and their tongues dancing at the tips.

Haruki kept his eyes open as Klaus pushed all the way back in, slowly this time. He arched his back and tried to feel every inch of Klaus' cock. The tapered length, the bulbous head pressing into the deepest part of him. He held his breath when Klaus began to withdraw until he was almost completely out. There, Klaus paused, eyes blazing, before thrusting back again. Slowly.

Haruki groaned, low and long and plaintive. He wrapped Klaus in his arms, legs hooked around Klaus’ lower back, as Klaus started to fuck him properly, though he picked up the pace only a little. A slow, purposeful motion that made Haruki’s body feel like it was being lit from within.

Klaus kept his forehead near Haruki’s, his breath hot on Haruki’s lips, dirty talk forgotten.

‘Haruki,’ Klaus groaned at length, his face drawn into something like a frown. ‘Oh, fuck.’

His whole body tensed as he came and he thrust in as far as he could, his mind reduced to a single swathe of white, before he reared back and pulled out entirely. He squeezed out the last few drops of come onto Haruki’s hole and then pushed it all in with his cock as Haruki groaned softly, his head slack.

Panting, Klaus collapsed onto his side next to him. And when Haruki shifted closer until they were touching again, Klaus wondered why that simple move meant so much.

Wolfpup, he thought with a smile. My pup. The only young wolf in the east.

He lifted Haruki's hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. The small gesture caused Haruki to blush anew; a reaction Klaus had seen from him once before. It was as though kissing Haruki's hand was a more tender and private act than anything Klaus had done to any other part of Haruki's body.

The seconds lengthened peacefully.

Why now? Haruki thought again. The question was on the tip of his tongue. What changed?

Although he couldn't find the courage to ask, it seemed as though Klaus’ thoughts had wandered down a similar path.

‘Sorry it took me so long, kid.’

After a moment of confusion, Haruki’s eyes found his. He wondered how to reply.

And he settled for the truth. ‘It’s okay.’

Klaus took Haruki's hand in his and felt it out with his own. Squeezing gently, turning it over and back, running his thumb over the knuckles, the palm and fingers.

‘At least I made it in time. You wouldn't have waited much longer, huh?’

Haruki hesitated, wondering if he ought to stay silent. Whether too much of his had already been bared.

‘I... probably would have. In one way or another.’

In reply to Klaus’ questioning glance, he said, ‘I mean... you already know. I've been thinking of you since I was fourteen. So...’

So I don't think I know how to stop, he thought almost dryly.

Klaus pulled him in closer and pressed the bridge of his nose to Haruki's ear. He thought of something that had baffled him since Ryoumei had revealed Haruki’s secret.

‘But, kid… you barely knew me back then.’ His tone was gentle and bemused.

Haruki smiled to himself. ‘I know.’ He looked down at Klaus' hand and cast his mind back. ‘It’s hard to explain. The first time I saw you was the day you arrived at the compound with Taki-sama. The cadets lined the drive for his arrival. You got out of the car and looked around and followed Taki-sama across the grounds. When I saw you… it wasn't  _this._..’

And it wasn't what you had with Taki, Haruki thought. Or what Kolya has with Meiji.

‘But it was something. And after you saved my life during that air raid and... and especially after No Man's Land...’ He paused and his gaze moved from Klaus’ hand to his chest, to the light golden hairs there. ‘It's always been you. It's the only thing I’ve always been sure of over the past ten years –’

It was almost by chance that he glanced up to see Klaus watching him with an expression Haruki had never seen before.

He suddenly wondered how long Klaus had let him talk. He began to hear the terrifying obsession in his own words.

‘I — I'm sorry if th—’

The fact that Klaus’ kiss cut him off mid-word came almost as a relief — Haruki didn’t have the faintest idea how he would have finished that sentence. He was pulled against Klaus with a strength and abruptness that reminded him of the first time Klaus had ever kissed him; amidst smoke and gunfire on the streets of Hokane.

Between the victory of that day and the few minutes they stole for themselves in the little bedroom leading off Feulner’s private study, they weren’t prepared for what came next.

* * *

Only ten minutes had passed since they had strolled through the lively operations hall into Feulner’s private quarters. By the time they returned, Haruki's uniform not looking much worse for wear, there still hadn't been any word from Koyama or Tachibana. But there was word from someone they didn’t expect.

‘Sir,’ Hasebe said, hanging up the phone as Haruki approached. ‘General Saigo Nakamori was found in a holding cell when we took over Tsuji Military Prison. He has asked many times to be brought here to speak with you in person. He says he has information of some kind.’

Haruki processed the request. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think he’s worth listening to. Any inside information might help us negotiate with the capital.’

‘Then have him sent. I’ll receive him downstairs.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Klaus and Kolya followed him down. The lobby was an echoing space of marble at the base of the grand stairs.

Haruki exhaled and checked his watch. He had told Hasebe to bring him word as soon as they heard from the capital. And now there was something apparently urgent that Nakamori wished to relay. He wondered if too much was coming to a head at once. He absently examined the swirls and patchy discolourations of the wall nearby; marble experimenting with its own little cosmos.

Klaus watched him for a few moments.

‘Where're you headed after this, kid?’

His voice, gentle though it was, echoed in the marble space.

Haruki turned. ‘After what?’

‘You know. After Tachibana surrenders, and the war’s over, and Meiji-sama’s on the throne.’ A bored, ironic lilt. He glanced at Kolya. ‘This guy's going to be making himself comfortable in the Imperial Palace, I guess.’ He scoffed a little, as though he wasn't sure what the world was coming to.

Kolya’s expression didn't shift in the slightest.

‘What's your plan?’ Klaus asked, turning back to Haruki.

‘I haven't thought about it,’ Haruki said honestly. Ever since he returned from the west to the Fifteenth and rose through the ranks, he couldn't imagine his life anywhere else. The compound, for better or worse, had been his home for the past two years. It was a feeling Klaus shared.

He looked over at Klaus where he stood, leaning his shoulder into the wall.

‘What about you?’ he asked nervously. He was frustrated to hear that the uncertainty in his voice was accentuated by the echo.

Klaus’ shrug was casual, almost as though to offset the way his eyes simmered. ‘I go where you go.’

It was visceral; the ripple of indignation and protectiveness that ran through Kolya in that moment. He would never forget, and never forgive, what Klaus had done to Haruki. Not only the physical pain and the way it felt like Haruki had folded into nothing in Kolya’s arms as he cried, but also the strange shell of him that Kolya had seen over the past few days before Klaus returned. It seemed that whether Klaus was there or not, Haruki kept suffering at his hands. Kolya’s resentment of Klaus would never end.

But for just a moment it wavered. It wavered when he flicked his gaze to Haruki and saw the effect that Klaus’ gratingly casual words had had on him. The startled and still uncertain happiness in his gentle eyes. Affection for his former master came to the fore and Kolya’s fraternal protectiveness gave way, just slightly, to a deeply begrudging relief on Haruki’s behalf.

He wondered, though, if there was some way he could communicate to Klaus, without the ever-frustrating need for words, that he wouldn’t hesitate to end the Saxon’s life with his own hands if he ever hurt Haruki again.

Haruki and Klaus held their gaze until the announcement was made that Nakamori had been brought to the embassy.

‘Bring him in,’ Haruki ordered.

And so Nakamori was brought up the steps outside the lobby and brought before the commander, flanked by two guards.

The demise of General Saigo Nakamori was quite visible indeed. His jowls sagged without any of their usual dignity. Both his thinning hair and thick eyebrows were pronounced, as was the expression of defeat etched into his features. Each move he made jangled the cuffs that held his hands together before him.

Haruki waited for him to speak with a cold glimmer in his gaze.

Nakamori opened his mouth a few times before deciding on, ‘I am grateful that you agreed to speak to me.’

‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ Haruki said, not so much briskly as pointedly. ‘We're waiting to hear from the capital and negotiate terms of surrender, in case you haven’t been told.’

‘I gathered.’

‘What is it you wanted to say?’

‘I… I am afraid that Meiji, when he – Meiji-sama –’ Nakamori corrected himself in time, without even needing to see the flash in Kolya’s eyes. ‘When Meiji-sama is emperor once more that I will be held responsible for… for everything that I was forced to do under the reign of Tachibana.’

‘You won’t be alone in facing that punishment,’ Haruki said, coldness leaking into his tone now. ‘If that's any consolation. Every man who was responsible for forcing Meiji-sama’s abdication using the contemptible threats you used will face the same adjudication and the same punishment.’

‘I was hoping there might be some – some leniency, if I were to –’

‘There will be no leniency.’

Klaus almost pursed his lips. Vicious pup, he thought, recalling Azusa’s words.

Nakamori dithered for a few seconds, eyes roaming as though scanning the options before his face.

‘When we face trial and court martial, you'll... still need to prove everything, and there's a chance there won’t be enough evidence implicating Tachibana. He was careful about everything he did. It will be harder than you think to make him atone for what he's done.’

Haruki frowned. It was a peripheral concern that didn’t weigh on the tense situation surrounding the Imperial Palace at that moment.

‘I have faith that whatever tribunal is set up will see that justice is served.’

‘But if –’

‘If you are only here to try to save your own skin and not help us broker some kind of agreement with the palace, you’ve wasted my time.’

‘No, listen –’

‘Take him away,’ Haruki said to the guards. He turned to head back up the stairs with Kolya behind him. Smiling, Klaus followed.

And Nakamori reached for his final bargaining chip.

‘Tachi – Tachibana was responsible for Roskilde!’

Klaus’ smile disappeared. His ears burned with the name that echoed loudly in the marble space.

Haruki frowned and turned. ‘What?’

Nakamori’s eyes were alight with hope. The guards escorting him paused when they saw the commander walking back down the stairs.

‘Tachibana was responsible for the whole disaster,’ Nakamori repeated, straining to look over his shoulder.

‘They were his weapons on the train,’ Haruki said guardedly. ‘We already know that.’

‘You don't understand. He’s the reason that the cargo was detonated. We – he – and Rossi intended it as a demonstration. To scare Meiji into – Meiji-sama – into action.’ Nakamori flailed, struggling to relay the facts properly with his own life on the line. ‘Because of the arms race with the west, and –’

Klaus drew alongside Haruki, his pulse threatening to drown out Nakamori’s voice. He stared at the man before him as though he was someone crucial who had slipped under his radar for years. His vision was reducing to a point.

‘How is that possible?’ Haruki asked quietly. ‘How could he have triggered the detonation if he –?’

‘An explosive device on the train,’ Nakamori said, grateful for a solid question to answer.

Klaus’ mouth was dry. His vision reduced further, as did his hearing. A singular pain that claimed him with fresh claws. He heard only Nakamori’s fatal words.

‘If you’re willing to make a deal with me, Commander, I’ll testify to that. In front of the whole nation, the whole world. He was responsible for it all.’

Taki’s frail body. His gentle voice and unfocused eyes. The way his hand clenched Klaus’ shirt in their bed, in the house that smelled like sandalwood, as he rode waves of pain.

Taki’s body in the blue light of dawn. Taki.

Taki.

Haruki blinked, trying to see past the shock and mindful, above all, of the alarming way in which Klaus had tensed beside him.

‘How can I know you're telling the truth? There's no way for you to prove that Tachibana –’

‘I planted the bomb on the train myself,’ Nakamori said, remorse entirely supplanted by relief. ‘If you’re willing to make a deal, I can prove –’

Klaus’ hand moved of its own accord. He drew his gun out of the holster and stepped forward. He heard Haruki’s voice. He even saw the guards on either side of Nakamori reach for their own weapons. But he didn’t care.

Nakamori’s eyes widened when he saw the glint of the barrel and he cowered for only a moment before the bullet passed straight through his skull.

The former Minister for Defence fell to the marble floor amidst the shock and exclamations around him which reverberated off the walls, and a deep, rich pool of blood collected beneath his startled, frozen expression.

And Klaus walked past it, past the body and the blood and the shouts, straight into the light outside, where the guards posted near the gate had also taken a few cautious steps towards the building, alerted by the loud gunshot.

The sun was bright that afternoon, over the city and over the manicured grounds in front of the embassy. It gave him clarity. Focus.

An enemy that Klaus couldn’t see. One that had taken Taki from him as Klaus slept, without trace and without mercy. And now it had a name. It had a face. And he was sitting comfortably behind the fortress-like walls of the Imperial Palace, surrounded by nothing more than men and metal. That was nothing. Klaus would blast his way through, he would hack and saw and tear. He would reduce the palace to cinders. And he would make Tachibana suffer at his hands.

‘Klaus!’

He barely gave any thought to how powerfully everything had been overwritten. The gentle words of Taki’s letter. The soft touch of Haruki’s hands at dawn. None of it mattered, suddenly, as much as this.

‘Klaus, wait!’

The talons sank into wounds that had only just begun to heal and tore without much give. He was pulled straight to his bike.

Haruki caught up with him first.

It was almost jarring, seeing deep eyes and the long, beautiful line of Haruki's jaw. It was an image that didn’t fit where Klaus had fallen. Where he needed to be.

‘Listen to me,’ Haruki was saying, hands on Klaus’ arms, trying to stop him.

Klaus pulled away easily and almost made it to his bike when Haruki stepped in front of it, a little out of breath, arm outstretched.

‘Get out of the way,’ Klaus said, his voice low; a voice he barely recognised.

‘No.’

The firmness of his tone. The hand on Klaus’ chest. It almost got through to him, almost as much as the fact that he realised he had almost been prepared to push Haruki out of the way, fling him aside if need be. That urge, fleeting though it was, shocked him enough to slow down. But still –

‘Kid,’ he said in a hiss, trying to channel his fire into words. ‘Don’t try to stop me. I’m breaking into that palace and Tachibana –’

‘I’m not trying to stop you,’ Haruki said, pressing hard against Klaus’ chest as he tried to push past him. ‘Klaus, I want to help you!’

It was only a frown but Haruki was relieved to see it.

‘What?’

‘I want to help you do it,’ Haruki repeated, his voice and his gaze unyielding.

A little more. Klaus’ narrow field of vision widened just a little more.

‘What do you mean?’

Haruki’s sorrow over Taki was real. As was his numb disbelief and anger that someone had been responsible for it, in a very real way. But none of it compared to how much his heart ached for Klaus and all that he had seen him go through over the past year. He had seen Klaus lose himself in it, and he had known that Klaus, at times, had only been a step away from being engulfed completely. And Haruki had felt that pain for himself, he had carried it in his chest and on his body, and he had borne it all for the sake of a love that defied sense and reason. His anger burned for Klaus and he felt the need, for the first time, to let someone suffer for it. Even the shock of witnessing Nakamori die before his eyes had ebbed in the past few seconds.

He knew what this meant for Klaus. And he would abandon honour and reason once more for Klaus’ sake.

‘Tachibana will answer for what he’s done, I promise.’

Klaus grit his teeth, his head pounding, aching like it hadn’t done for days, at his temples and at the base of his skull, brought about by the unmerciful sound of the gunshot reverberating around the lobby. If Haruki was talking about procedure – tribunals and sentences and carefully metered out justice –

‘You don’t understand –’

‘I do,’ Haruki insisted, and again the conviction in his voice made Klaus falter. ‘You said today, on the balcony, that you trust me. Trust me again, okay? I’m going to get you into the palace, and I’ll give you Tachibana. Before anyone else gets to him. Do you understand?’

Haruki wouldn’t rein in the wolf. He would channel it and unleash it. And he would make sure that Klaus would emerge, alive and unscathed, on the other side. He wouldn’t let Klaus go barrelling headlong into his own death that afternoon. He wouldn’t lose Klaus, now that he was finally his.

And so he held his ground between Klaus and his bike and waited for Klaus to come back to him. He remembered, poignantly, how Kaiser had strained against Haruki’s grip at his collar, snarling and snapping his jaws.

Head pounding, rage pulsing in his ears, and with an effort that seemed beyond him, Klaus blinked down and finally saw Haruki, properly. He quietly spoke his name.

Haruki reached out, in front of Kolya and the soldiers near the gate and the ones spilling into the lobby from upstairs, to put his hand on the side of Klaus’ neck, thumb near Klaus’ ear.

‘I’m here,’ Haruki said firmly. ‘Stay with me. Okay?’

Klaus searched his eyes, darting slowly from one to the other, trying to pull back all of the waves of energy that would have had him coursing ahead. He felt Haruki’s hand on his neck. He tried to steady his breathing.

And he nodded.

And Haruki fought the urge to close his eyes out of relief.

Although it felt like they stood there for a long time, in reality it was only a few seconds later that they heard it.

A distant thud from far away, beyond the roads and buildings of the embassy. It made Haruki and Klaus break their gaze and glance in its direction. It almost reminded Klaus of the sound delivered to his shed as he read Taki’s letter; the grenades that had been exploded from only a few klicks away.

But this was slightly different. It sounded like it came from much further. And yet, if it still came through to them, sounding like that –

‘Haruki-sama!’ Hasebe reached him, looking paler than he had ever been. He had sidestepped Nakamori’s body in the lobby, sparing it only a brief, shocked expression.

Haruki let go of Klaus’ neck as Klaus turned. ‘What is it?’

‘Tachibana ordered a nuclear strike against the Fourteenth, sir,’ Hasebe said, breathlessly.

* * *

He knew now the desolation of watching an empire crumble before he had even begun to build it. His was the Land of the Rising Sun, and he would have built her a empire over which it would never set. With his own two hands, with everything he had begun building even during the reign of two emperors before him who were blind to their nation’s potential. Their glory. It would have all been his.

And now, instead, he was cowering. He knew it, even when his eyes showed only his office as it had always been. The quiet steadiness of the guards on either side of him, black-clad. He knew it because of what was happening in the war room next to his. They were surrounded and Yamamoto and Shoda were awaiting a response. They were waiting for Tachibana to lay down his katana at their feet and beg forgiveness.

They were waiting, and Koyama was waiting there before Tachibana's desk. He alone was permitted into the office, and he alone carried Tachibana’s response to the phone in the adjoining room.

Tachibana couldn’t be sure if it was a move of bravery or desperation. A final stand. A warning. A reminder of what power was, and that he still had enough to contend with, no matter how many men surrounded the capital in that moment, wanting his head.

He would blow them all to dust before he surrendered.

* * *

It took a few more minutes for the information to pour in. Haruki was back in the operations hall and Klaus stood nearby, face grim. Eyes still burning.

The call from the palace had finally arrived but Haruki kept it on hold until he found out exactly what had happened.

The Fourteenth Armoured Division was no more.

From all initial reports, it appeared to be a low-yield, low-range nuclear missile, let loose by the troops that the capital had sent to subdue the rogue divisions. Troops which, until a few minutes ago, had been retreating.

Haruki and his men tried to wrap their heads around the nature and extent of the damage the first of its kind since Roskilde. Klaus stood near the doors, listening in quietly.

‘Eighty-seven men were in the compound itself, sir,’ Tansho reported. ‘We think Commander Yagata wasn't there at the time of the strike. We’re still trying to locate him.’

‘What about the surrounding towns?’

The Fourteenth was eight klicks away from populated areas. None of them had been directly impacted. But wind gusts were strong. Haruki gave the evacuate order immediately.

The scattering of homes and farms near the Fourteenth, however, had been reduced to nothing.

Haruki's anger welled afresh.

‘The compound itself?’

‘Hard to tell, sir, without a bird’s-eye view. From the reports of one of the tank units nearby, it's… completely gone. Perimeter wall destroyed, buildings, barracks…’

After a pause, Haruki finally walked to the lieutenant who had been keeping a certain call on hold. He set the phone to his ear.

Tachibana was alone in his office, with only his guards for company. Even Koyama had been forced to wait in the war room outside for their fates to be decided by the solitary man within, each feeling, for the first time, the weight of that imbalance.

‘My men spoke for me when they agreed to surrender,’ he said, his tone low and containing only a trace amount of hesitation. ‘They spoke too soon. I will not surrender until I have amassed my entire army to deal with this misguided revolt.’

‘They won't make it,’ Haruki returned without skipping a beat. ‘By the time they arrive at the city, there will be a new emperor on the throne and all of the crimes you have committed will be known the world over.’

‘You saw how I dealt with the insubordination of the Fourteenth,’ Tachibana said, voice rising as he prepared to reveal his final card. ‘My men are still in the south, awaiting my order. The very same weapons are pointed at the Fifteenth Armoured Division as we speak.’

Haruki’s breath hitched. Hasebe, who had been listening in to the call on another line, glanced up in shock.

‘With only a word from me,’ Tachibana said, ‘it will be gone.’

‘With only a word from _me,_ the palace will be overrun.’ Haruki could only hope that they had enough to do such a thing. His mind raced. ‘I will give you one final chance to surrender.’

‘If I hear that so much as a single shot is fired at my gate, I will order them to take out your compound.’

Haruki grit his teeth and fists, numb with anger at his cowardice, at the fact that he was playing with weapons far from him, far from his own skin.

‘You have been warned,’ Tachibana said, that tremor of hesitation slightly more pronounced.

‘So have you,’ Haruki said before slamming the phone down and making the lieutenant jump slightly where he sat.

Haruki took a moment before he turned to the others. He relayed, quickly and quietly, the sudden, unthinkable shift in the state of play. An impasse with devastating consequences.

‘What are the chances we can find the missile launcher, wherever it is? Surely whoever is left near the compound, whoever’s left from the Fourteenth can at least try to...’

Tansho trailed away. They had seen the low-yield nuke launchers themselves; they had several in their stockpile. Deadly accuracy. Highly portable. And above all, a range of three klicks. They could be anywhere.

‘We’ll hold off on the attack on the palace,’ Tansho said, with more confidence. ‘If he wants his whole army to rush to his defence before he surrenders, so be it. By then, our troops will have arrived from the Western Front, and –’

‘We will lose,’ Hasebe said bluntly. ‘If Tachibana has time to amass all of his forces, we don't stand a chance. Even Shoda knows that.’

Silence fell. Haruki leaned forwards over the desk, hands flat before him.

He then glanced up at Klaus, who hadn't said a word; Klaus, who only minutes ago had been brought back from the brink of yet another abyss by the love of his commander and whose gaze now carried a simple message.

_It's your call._

Haruki straightened.

‘Evacuate everyone who’s left in the compound,’ Haruki said, his voice quiet and his eyes almost absent. Then his gazed focused sharply on Tansho. ‘Now. Get Meiji-sama out and report when he’s at least twenty klicks away.’

Kolya’s pulse surged. The fear that gripped him then almost made him dizzy, and only the look that Haruki gave him – for Haruki had turned with the sole purpose of meeting his eye – gave him any shred of solace.

Meiji, Haruki thought. Meiji and Ryoumei and Suguri and Watanabe and all the nurses and maids still at the compound. He knew he was risking all of their lives. He carried that weight squarely on his shoulders. That was the moment he understood what it truly meant to be Commander. It wasn't victory or defeat or pride or respect or even honour. It was this. This burden.

‘Send word to Shoda. To all of our forces surrounding the palace.’ He moved slowly to the head of the room as men began to bustle around him. ‘Prepare them to strike, on my mark.’

His mind, even as he spoke, was full of the emblem of the triple-leafed rose. And the little corner where he had buried Kaiser. None of his men saw the sorrow that gripped him.

* * *

Almost half an hour went by in the silence of Tachibana’s office.

Then came a moment that hung in the air, like the one that preceded his phone call to Nakamori that planted a bomb on a train.

And then he heard. The _Hitobito_ and Yamamoto’s men were attempting to seize the palace.

Tachibana let out a strange sound, like a short held-breath. He gave his own order, his counter-strike that would achieve nothing, and again he couldn't be sure if it was out of desperation or pride.

And he couldn't help but feel as though he had made his final mistake.

* * *

At the very centre of the headquarters of the Rosen Maiden Fifteenth Armoured Division, which had served as the Reizen winter residence in a former life that it barely recalled, there grew a single cherry blossom tree.

This tree had grown and swayed and flowered and wilted and thrived over the seasons, silently, unobtrusively, not entirely unlike its groundskeeper, Watanabe, who alone paid it any attention. For a few days each spring, the tree had spread its light confetti across the grounds, ethereally pink, petals glistening like crystal in some lights as they wafted across the hard metal of war machines, lying gently atop their war-weary backs.

In the moment before the nuclear missile tore through trunk and root and soil, in a moment suspended in time, it parted the branches of the cherry blossom tree almost as gently as a lover’s hand through hair.

And in a forgotten corner of the compound, the groundskeeper tended quietly to his little yellow and white flowers; flowers whose name Klaus didn't know. Long since hard of hearing, Watanabe didn't hear the radio in the room behind him calling for an immediate evacuation, nor did he hear the missile’s high, keening approach. The last thing he saw, which he observed with a gentle smile, was the way the tall, pale wheat-like stalks of maiden grass dipped in the sudden breeze.

The grand, arched gates. The long driveway. The small rows of roses that grew in inner courtyards. The bright, open square with its remaining tanks. The commander's bedroom with its large window, through which blinding afternoon sunlight had fallen.

The small shed in the officer’s courtyard.

Dust. In the space of a breath.

* * *

‘We have a confirmed hit, sir,’ Hasebe said, his voice drawn.

The silence that claimed the makeshift operations hall of the embassy was peculiar. It was as though the country's heart had stopped beating for a moment.

The Rosen Maiden, where Klaus had followed Taki. Where Haruki had seen a tall, blonde foreigner in a tan coat for the first time. Where the gods had brought together men of singular abilities and singular passion.

More reports rolled in. Meiji was safe and far away, on approach to the capital. Initial reports claimed that everyone had made it out. And yet the loss they all felt spoke of something more ineffable.

After ensuring that Meiji and the rest of his men had cleared the fallout radius, Haruki listened quietly to new reports of the _Hitobito’s_ first attack at the gates of the palace. The defence they met.

He turned and moved towards the door, his hand subconsciously moving to the gun at his side. Klaus’ gun.

‘Ready a jeep for me at the gate,' he told Hasebe. 'I'm handing control to you until you hear from me again.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Klaus' gaze locked on his. Kolya held the door open for him.

‘Let's finish this.’


	65. No Earthly Power

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Small edit: when I first wrote this chapter, there was a line about how Kolya only ever kept one secret from Meiji. I've just changed that to "one of two secrets". (The second secret comes up in Chapter 68. I promise I'm not saying that just to be a tease, it's just so you don't think there's a secret you've missed or something.)

The palace was stormed.

A tyrant fell.

And the people were vindicated.

But while the radios and televisions in that nation and the world over were brought the news, one thing they didn't mention, and one thing that history never resolved, was precisely how Emperor Tachibana met his end.

While Haruki led the siege of the Imperial Palace, Meiji had arrived at the embassy where Izumi Shunsuke had arranged for a barrage of reporters and cameras to greet him. It was the powerful part that the quiet Izumi had always played — his own personal strike that he had taken in every war, fuelled by his belief that there was no freedom without freedom of the press.

Meiji's face and voice took to the air, on airwaves that were newly free.

_'My fellow countrymen. I address you for the first time in a long time.'_

The gates fell under cannon fire.

_'Over the past three years, a shadow has fallen across our nation.'_

Klaus burst through the doors of the Entrance Hall, ahead of anyone else.

_'Our values — the honour and the patriotism for which our people are known — have been taken as the pretext for going down a destructive path. My abdication was the first step, and one I regret deeply, whether it was coerced or not.'_

The regiment outside was buckling in and surrendering and the wave of men that swarmed the palace quickly engulfed the Imperial Guard within. Black-clad guards were swept back by the multi-coloured swathe of uniforms, whether soldiers or revolutionaries.

Hot on Klaus' tail, Kolya and Haruki made their way through the Entrance Hall and the Throne Room, which was empty save for the guards stationed at the exits. Kolya pulled Haruki behind him and took them out, a single bullet in each of their chests.

Whether a parting shot or a stray bullet, one of the guards' guns went off as he fell. Haruki's left shin was nicked.

_'The wars that have been waged in the name of glory, the men who have died on our land and on foreign lands, will be a mark on our history.'_

Klaus' burning need to get to Tachibana took a backseat as soon as he heard Haruki cry out. He was at Haruki's side even before Kolya, who took a second longer to lower his gun and turn.

_'The very same weapons which forced my hand three years ago have been unleashed today. They are unforgiving. They carry the curse of years, of generations, wherever they land. They are a mark of how far we can go when we cave to our basest of instincts. Our desires to tear down.'_

Blood streamed from a wound that Haruki realised, through the searing pain, was nothing more than a graze. He tried to convince Klaus of the same but Klaus' hands were already at the wound, assessing the damage. He suggested that they turn back. Haruki refused. He looked up at Kolya and told him to mow down everything ahead of them.

Klaus lifted Haruki to his feet without another word, his arm around Haruki's waist as firm as steel.

_'But we have also seen today that justice and honour continue to reside in our great nation.'_

Many lay dead by Kolya's hand from that point on.

Reinforced, barricaded doors fell at his feet as though they were made of nothing.

_'Remarkable men, men who fight for you, for the victory of the people, are turning the tide.'_

They reached the emperor's office, again barricaded, and which again swung open submissively with a single kick from Kolya. He took out Tachibana's personal guard at the doorway.

At Haruki's insistence, Klaus let go of him once they entered the room. Blood oozed out of his leg with each unsupported step but Haruki was able to move on his own.

The emperor stood alone in the middle of the office.

His final phone call had been to his wife, who cried for the first time that he had ever heard.

_'They are forging the way for us to regain our pride. Our freedom. And above all, our honour.'_

Haruki held Klaus' gaze for a few more seconds. Neither smiled.

Then Haruki turned and limped from the office. He pulled the door closed and remained on the other side beside Kolya.

Klaus then turned back to Tachibana and Tachibana saw his own death in Klaus' eyes. Klaus slowly put his gun back in its holster and stepped over Tachibana's guards.

Outside the door, Kolya kept an eye on Haruki but he didn't see the commander flinch, even when Tachibana's first strangled yell came through the door.

* * *

The nature of Tachibana's death was one of only two secrets that Kolya would ever keep from Meiji. He wasn't sure, at first, why he made the decision to do so. Perhaps it was because he knew that Meiji was the only one out of the four of them who wasn't a product of war. He saw it for its evil and its destruction and not its nuances. He couldn't understand the need for vengeance — the importance of it, the necessity of it — and, worse than that, the unendurable sense of failure if that need was never quenched; a rage and an impotence that would consume the soul.

Perhaps it was also because Kolya was, in a very slight sense, caught between his old master and his new. Despite the fact that Meiji was written for him by the hand of another, Haruki had saved him, brought him back to life, brought him to Meiji, and no matter what, Kolya still believed he owed the young commander more than he knew. He owed Klaus nothing, but he was willing to keep the secret of Klaus' vengeance if it meant that Haruki's name and honour and dignity would be kept intact in Meiji's eyes.

And it was a decision that hardly made a difference, in any case, when he stood tall and proud as Meiji's knight the following day and watched his master become sworn in again as the rightful Son of Heaven and ruler of the east.

* * *

Haruki never asked. He only knew that he stood outside the door for a little under ten minutes.

And so he didn't know how Klaus had unleashed the creature inside him with an almost methodical vengeance. He didn't know for sure, beyond a dark suspicion, that Klaus had done to Tachibana everything that had been done to Taki.

It didn't matter to Klaus that Taki's death hadn't been intentional in any way. If anything, it enraged him even further to think that all Taki had suffered had been nothing more than collateral. A careless sacrifice. Beauty trampled and killed[*](http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/hyakujitsu_no_bara/an/hyakujitsu-no-bara-chapter-1.html/44/) in the pursuit of power.

The blood that streamed from the emperor's nose and mouth, courtesy of Klaus' fists, were for each of the splitting headaches that had rendered Taki immobile. The bullets in his legs were for the times Taki had been too weak to stand. The bullet in his stomach, which was the second to last blow, and the one that Klaus dragged on for longest, for minutes, one that he observed closely in a crouch with a cold, detached fascination, was for when Taki's bones had felt like they were on fire. An internal agony they now shared; Taki lying prone in bed and Tachibana dragging himself a pitiful few inches across the floor as Klaus watched. An internal agony that lasted for months for Taki and long, horrendous minutes for Tachibana. An internal agony that nothing would soothe. Nothing but what came next. And it was the bullet in the centre of Tachibana's forehead, quick and merciful, which took him away as swiftly as Taki had been taken from him that blue dawn.

He opened the door and felt like he had stepped past something. Some monster that had reared behind him, inky black, that now lay dead.

And Haruki waited on the other side. The sounds of the siege began to grow louder. It was a clean victory for all outside. Haruki saw the flecks of blood on Klaus' jacket. The stained fists.

As though it came to him from a memory long past, Klaus remembered Haruki had been injured. He held out a hand to steady Haruki as he drew near. Kolya turned away.

Haruki pressed his forehead to Klaus'.

Chest heaving, Klaus closed his eyes.

Just for that day, for those few minutes, instead of being his light, Haruki had lowered himself into the darkness of the pit beside Klaus. And Klaus' gratitude for that simple act knew no bounds. In that moment, something was forged between them which no earthly power could break.

As they made their way back out, Haruki gave the quiet order to two of his men for the body of the former emperor to be taken care of so no evidence remained of how he had fallen from power.

* * *

At the embassy, Meiji rose to his feet when Kolya returned, feeling as though it had been much longer than five days since he sent his knight to fight and win a war on his behalf. Kolya knelt before Meiji and pressed Meiji's hand to his lips as astonished attendants, soldiers and even members of the press looked on.

Victory could be seen and heard. Airwaves across the nation were alive with it once more. Meiji's broadcast was played and replayed, his serene face captured against the symbolic backdrop of a western embassy. Names of those in charge of that historic movement were sounded out, some for the first time. Douman Tachibana's name made an appearance, as did that of a young westerner named Rudi, both of whom had taken part in _Hitobito_ attacks on the outskirts of the city, both of whom had fought on behalf of the Reizen daughters. Shoda's name, of course, appeared everywhere.

Commander and Captain, however, evaded the spotlight that evening.

While the palace was scoured and arrests were made and the gate rebuilt and the beginnings of Meiji's return were prepared for, Haruki climbed into bed in a small room off a small study in the embassy, his leg freshly wrapped in bandages. Klaus pulled him close and they slept through the night.

* * *

The following day was overcast but cool; unseasonable for summer, but somehow resulting in an oddly cleansing effect. There was a telling hush in the streets of the capital that morning. The capital, indeed the nation, found it had awoken in a state of tentative hope which bore fresh memories of all it had taken to arrive there. Those who had evacuated prepared to return. Those who remained continued to pick up the wreckage of their former lives, left in the wake of a conflict fought on their behalf. And they took comfort in something else. Something symbolic and significant that was taking place in the Imperial Palace.

In the Throne Room, Meiji re-took the oaths which he had never truly relinquished. The entire left side of the room was open to a boardwalk that looked out across a vast pond housing rushes and reeds and a heron who appeared to be camera-shy. The sky continued to be heavy with cloud cover, thinning in places where a pale yellow glow seemed to press against it from the other side.

Klaus stood beside Haruki among the many dozens who filled the room. For the entirety of that morning, he had kept Haruki in his field of vision, even when the commander was whisked away by shoguns and dignitaries and reporters. Klaua made sure he could see him and that he wasn't lost to sight even for a moment. He never would again.

Since the previous day, he had begun his slow climb back up out of the pit, led by a warm hand. He had awoken to the feeling of Haruki's fingers in his hair behind his ear. Haruki's arm was trapped beneath Klaus' neck against the pillow and he had curled it back over Klaus' head. Klaus breathed in Haruki's scent and moved his hand down to the bandages covering his calf. And with only a subtle shift in his hands, a subtle shift in Haruki's breathing, Klaus was suddenly pulling him beneath his body, kissing him deeply, sliding between his legs.

He kept climbing as the hours went on, even though a grim task awaited them before they made it to the Imperial Palace. Ryoumei had volunteered for the job, driven by his own anger and disbelief at what had become of the Fifteenth Armoured Division. Their small patrol plane flew as close to the site as they dared. The click of the photographer's camera punctuated the drone of the plane and the silence within.

It had been completely scorched from the earth. There was only flattened rubble spreading outwards in almost precise concentric circles from the scorch mark in the centre. The surrounding roads and farms had also been wiped out, evacuated in time but leaving dozens homeless. It was a part of the south, of the Reizen's historic province, that was gone in every way as definitively as the young prince himself, the last of his name, was gone. There was not even any hope of rebuilding or re-planting, at least not in their lifetime. A No Man's Land in miniature, Klaus thought grimly, remembering a prescient thought he himself had had about the nearby training grounds.

Klaus looked at Haruki, whose eyes were fixed outside the small airplane window, his expression both firm and worn. News had reached them that the groundskeeper, Watanabe, hadn't been on the list of evacuees. Even Klaus felt a hard stone of grief form in the pit of his stomach over the news, over the loss of a man he had never even seen with his own eyes. And so he knew how much it must be weighing on Haruki.

He knew that no matter what he said or did, the destruction of the Fifteenth was Haruki's burden alone to bear. It was his decision, the one that had to be made, and all Klaus could do was watch him bear that responsibility from afar.

Despite all of it, Klaus found he was still basking in it  _—_ in a light that didn't even make it past the overhanging blanket of clouds _—_ as he watched Meiji being sworn in, and Kolya being officially pledged as his knight, with all the pageant and grandeur that the pair didn't have and didn't need in a small inner courtyard at the compound.

Meiji's beauty was exacerbated, made to look even more sublime and unearthly, by grace of the hair that was gathered in intricate swirls and pleats over his head, fastened by wooden pins and topped by a white beaded headdress. The orange chrysanthemum of his house was etched in subtle patterns over thick flowing robes.

As for Kolya, even Klaus had to admit looked every part the emperor's knight. Black and silver adorned the stiff, tunic-like raiment that fit over his dark robes. A long katana hung at his side, its handle silver and gleaming.

'Do you even know how to use that thing? Or is it just for show?'

Before the ceremony, Haruki had found Kolya to congratulate him and then been pulled aside by Ayabe, shogun of the Reizen province. That left Klaus and Kolya alone for a minute on the boardwalk. As Klaus expected, he got no answer. Kolya stood stiff and alert, facing the room within while Klaus leaned back against the railing on an elbow.

'I'm curious. Did Meiji-sama ever tell you that he wanted me to be his knight? Way back when you were just a kid?'

And to Klaus' surprise, a very slight flinch crossed Kolya's face.

'He… mentioned it,' Kolya muttered.

It was with some effort that Klaus concealed his satisfaction over the fact that Kolya had been roused to reply and that his reply was laced with resentment.

'Oh, good. So you know.' Klaus smiled and stretched his arms liberally behind his back and scratched his throat, turning his gaze skyward. He spoke slowly and deliberately. 'I think his exact words were that he would be willing to part with a great deal for it to be me.'

A muscle twitched prominently on Kolya's jaw and Klaus' smile widened.

'Good thing I turned him down, isn't it? You're welcome,' he added. He slapped Kolya loudly on the shoulder before he left the boardwalk.

Even as he chipped away at Kolya, he had kept an eye on Haruki. Suguri had told Haruki to avoid putting pressure on his left leg for several days and even suggested the use of a single crutch, which Haruki decided he didn't need. Once Ayabe was done murmuring in Haruki's ear and Meiji's impending arrival was announced, Klaus went to stand by his elbow, feeling a small stir when Haruki turned to smile at him. He wondered if it was something he would ever get used to. He gently took Haruki's arm, though he wasn't sure if it was out of genuine concern or an excuse to touch him, and helped him to his place among the military officers lining the room.

At time like ponderous drum beats, other times with stiff military precision, the rites and ceremonies and oaths took place. Meiji spoke gently to his ancestors to inform them of his re-ascension. The Banzai banners ruffled. At length, Meiji knelt on a cushion atop the small raised platform at the head of the Throne Room, adorned by tassled curtains. Kolya took his place in front of the platform to Meiji's right, as though he was simply resuming a post he had held for years.

Meiji turned to take in all of those who had gathered before him. And his eyes fell on one pair in particular.

He called Haruki forward.

* * *

By dint of his injury, Haruki was not required to kneel before the emperor. He stood and saluted. Meiji's slow nod allowed him to lower his hand and hold it by his side. He graciously accepted each of Meiji's accolades for his role in all that had happened.

Klaus wondered, idly, about the formalities that inevitably followed victory. No matter how important it was for closure and for morale, to him it always felt like they were trying to tie a pretty ribbon over horrors past. Cynicism aside, however, it was good to see Meiji and Haruki standing at the front of the Throne Room as they were now, and it was especially good to hear Haruki's achievements enumerated.

'The Yamamoto family name has a proud military history, stretching as far back as ancient times. Your family has always stood by royalty and nobility and served with pride.'

'Thank you, Your Majesty.'

There was a pause that was drawn out a fraction longer than it ought to have been. Haruki almost succumbed to the urge to glance up, but he kept his eyes on the tatami.

'Have you heard of the process of ennoblement, by any chance, Commander?'

Haruki took a moment. 'I haven't, Your Grace.'

'It is a rare one. A formality that is granted in the most exceptional of circumstances. Originally it was intended as a way of allowing new members into the Imperial Court. Warriors whose family name was not noble and yet have proven themselves so, beyond doubt, through acts of valour and selflessness and dedication to one's country. And in fact, that is the very reason I am extending it now.'

At that, Haruki broke etiquette and glanced up to meet the emperor's smiling gaze. An attendant had procured for Meiji a long katana of the sort Haruki had seen only once before. This one, however was slightly different to Taki's in a few ways. The threading particular to a different house, the gilded sheath bearing etchings of a chrysanthemum.

'An honorary member of my Imperial Court. A nobility that is granted by deed rather than by blood. An honorary prince of the court and of the nation. I cannot think of anyone who deserves the title more.'

A gust of wind seemed to audibly disturb the surface of the pond outside in the silence that followed.

When Haruki was sixteen he had lamented to Ukiyo that he dreamed of something that was happening in another world. Ukiyo's words of wisdom to the contrary, while comforting, had never really left an impact. Perhaps it was for that reason that Haruki felt momentarily paralysed.

He stared at the katana and realised he wanted badly to turn around to look at Klaus. It surely wasn't something he could accept. It wasn't even something he thought was possible. For long seconds, he remained standing, knowing it would be improper of him to turn away from the emperor at such a crucial moment.

And so he carried thoughts of Ukiyo and thoughts of Klaus as he stepped forward, with a limp that was almost unnoticeable, and took his title.

Klaus, his heart swelling with pride, thought vaguely about ribbons and horrors past, and thought much more clearly about the kid who had stood up on the back of his bike and clung to his jacket.

* * *

He had returned to Klaus' side feeling somewhat at a loss. And he felt that emotion somehow wither and crescendo at the same time when he finally caught Klaus' gaze. And he could do nothing about it while they stood apart in the Throne Room; nothing except clutch the katana in his hand, feeling the metal sheath grow warm beneath his touch. A weapon and a title and a privilege that he would never feel worthy of, no matter how many wars he won.

And something that would never, in any case, come anywhere close to mattering as much as he who stood next to him then, standing strong and still, as though he never planned to leave.

When the room was dismissed, Haruki almost breathed a sigh of relief. Despite how soundly he had slept the night before, he wanted nothing more than to crawl back under the sheets and to do so beside someone who, he was very slowly coming to accept, against all odds, was now his.

But he didn't get to breathe that sigh. An attendant approached Haruki once the Throne Room was almost empty and informed him that the emperor wished to see him, alone, in his private quarters.

Klaus saw the way Haruki concealed his exhaustion. He also saw the way Haruki held the katana; as though it was an uncomfortable weight.

'I'll hold onto that,' he said gently. 'Find me afterwards, okay? I'm going to go see a man about a heron. Well, a kitchen maid about a heron.'

Though Haruki didn't have a clue what he was talking about, Klaus' familiar voice, the tone that was somehow both brazen and soothing, was enough to make him smile. He handed him the katana with a strange relief and followed the attendant down the boardwalk towards the emperor's private residence.

He smiled at Kolya who stood just inside the doorway to the sitting room. The room was large and bare, with the paper-thin walls of the sliding doors brightly lit from the strengthening sunlight outside, bringing to light the soft watercolours of tremulous cherry blossoms and mountains covered in mist.

Meiji awaited him at a low table with his headdress removed but his hair still piled atop his head. Another of his attendants was pouring out a second cup of green tea before bowing and leaving.

'Thank you for coming, Commander,' Meiji said as Haruki bowed and took his seat. 'I'm sure there are places you would rather be.'

'Not at all, Your Majesty,' Haruki lied politely.

'Before I release you into the reprieve you well deserve, there were a few things I was hoping to discuss with you. Things both large and small.'

They spoke for what felt like a long time. Some things Haruki expected, things like the situation at the Western Front. Other things caught him completely off guard and he needed long moments before he thought of what to say. Above all, he couldn't understand why the emperor had chosen him for such discussions. He filed it all away to peruse later. To discuss at length with Klaus, perhaps as they lay together in bed later that day. His heart soared entirely of its own volition when he realised the simple fact that such a thing was even possible.

At the tail end of one of their conversations, one of the more abstract ones that still made Haruki's head spin a little when he reflected on it, there came a long pause. It reminded him of the one in the Throne Room that had preceded his ennobling. Something which hadn't even barely begun to sink in.

And so, with a flushed face that wasn't called for, Haruki attempted to express his gratitude for the honour that had been bestowed on him so unexpectedly. He thought of the gilded katana that Klaus now held for him.

Meiji inclined his head in elegant acknowledgement, and dismissal, of Haruki's words.

'It is a symbolic gesture, more than anything else. A rank and standing extended as a measure of my gratitude for all you have done.'

From the way the emperor's gaze flicked unsubtly to Kolya, Haruki understood that he was speaking of something other than the war that had just ended.

Meiji then looked at him again and seemed to consider his next words. 'Symbolic though it is, there is something else, something real, that it may entail. I don't know if it is something that has occurred to you yet.'

For some reason, Haruki suspected they had arrived at the reason behind why Haruki was asked to arrive alone. He wondered why he felt nervous.

'Regardless of what the future holds, there are some things that will always be reserved for the most illustrious of our nobility. Title. Property. And the ability to call on someone of your own choosing to make a certain lifelong pledge.'

He kept his gaze on the young commander and was rewarded when he saw the way the realisation slowly dawned. Haruki's head lifted sharply, his eyes wide.

_You were born to be a knight. You were born to be at your commander's side._

Like Klaus, Meiji had mulled over Taki's words for some time. Not a single one of them appeared to have been written without meaning. He wondered why Taki should have impressed Klaus' knighthood in that particular sentence.

And so now he watched Haruki and delivered his words delicately and slyly.

'If there was anyone you had in mind, it is now entirely in your purview whether you should confer that privilege onto them.'

When Haruki continued to be speechless, and looked like he might be for some time, Meiji smiled.

'Well,' he finished warmly. 'At any rate, it's something to consider.'

* * *

Haruki found Klaus on the other side of the rushes, sitting on the edge of a bank and sheltered from the Throne Room by the abundant red canopy of the maple trees. The pond had been untouched during the siege, but workers could be seen on the far shore, repairing broken boardwalks and footpaths.

'Good news,' Klaus said when Haruki approached. 'He's still alive.'

Haruki turned in the direction where he pointed and spied through the rushes an outline of white, and perhaps even a round, watchful eye.

'At least, I think it's him. Could be it's his kid and I just can't tell the difference. Actually, could be he's always been a she,' he reflected mildly. 'What the hell do I know.'

Haruki sat on the bank beside Klaus, helped to the ground by Klaus' hand. He felt the springy earth depress pleasantly beneath him. He gently eased his injured leg before him. Klaus watched the way glimmers of sun fell in his hair. Shone in little blinding glints on the silver insignia on his uniform.

Klaus then picked up the katana from the ground beside and handed it back to its new master. Haruki took it uncertainly.

'So what did His Imperial Majesty want to talk to you about?'

Haruki stared out across the pond. Klaus looked at him and wondered if it was because of the light falling through the maple leaves that he could see a faint reddish tinge around Haruki's ears.

'A few things,' Haruki said, his tone subdued.

His pulse was only just beginning to settle since his conversation with Meiji. Since the possibility, that single overwhelming idea, painted so unassumingly in Meiji's light cadence.

He didn't know why he couldn't tell Klaus. Why he couldn't bring himself to ask the question that it entailed.

Perhaps he felt like he hadn't earned it, no matter what Meiji or anyone else said. Perhaps it was because he quailed at the very thought of asking the question.

Perhaps he was afraid of Klaus' answer, whether it was yes or no.

Whatever the reason was, he kept it from Klaus, and it would take him a while to understand exactly why he did so.

'We… talked about what's happening on the Western Front.' Haruki tried to clear his throat as surreptitiously as possible. 'After Meiji called back all our forces, it looks like Rossi's troops are retreating. It'll take them weeks to make it back to Eurote. Shoda's overseeing their withdrawal and we might be called on if there's any trouble. But the west isn't at war anymore.'

Klaus made a noncommittal noise. 'I'm expecting Emmerich's thank you note in the mail any day now.'

Haruki smiled and wondered what Klaus' older brother was like.

His fingers unconsciously twirled the bamboo braids that trailed from the katana's handle, unaware that Klaus had done the same as he waited on the bank.

Klaus was leaning back on his hands, his head tilted slightly, his smile wide, relaxed and absent. His long legs stretched out almost to the edge of the water.

'At least it means Claudia and the kids are safe,' Klaus said, his mind on the swaying yellow fields. A rose garden edged by a stone wall. Where Taki's ashes grew into leaves and petals. With a sigh, he then turned and lay his head on Haruki's lap, careful not to put any pressure on his left leg. His eyes were closed, so he didn't see the slightly startled look on Haruki's face.

Haruki stared down at his serene face, heart pounding, and at first couldn't decide what to do with his hands. Klaus had done it as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

Klaus stayed there for a moment, feeling pinpricks of sun on his face and hearing the water whisper against the bank and rushes.

The darkness of the pit, the bloodstains that had been on his hands and jacket, the booms that reverberated in his skull, even the destruction of the Fifteenth Armoured Division - all abstractions. All nothing more than a story he had heard a long time ago. A tragedy that ended in a kind of happiness that was tremulous yet serene, dubious yet resolute, with parts that fit perfectly and some parts that, he hoped, would fit over time. The scent of the rose that hadn't faded, that he would sometimes catch on a faint breeze. The letter he kept folded in his pocket, even as he lay there.

He reached up almost unconsciously to the katana and felt the bamboo braids that trailed from its handle. An honorary prince, he thought. He opened his eyes.

'Way to earn that _sama,_ kid,' he said in a low rumble.

His eyes narrowed affectionately at the way Haruki averted his gaze. A subtle move that was both uncharacteristic of Haruki and spoke of his perpetual inability to see his own worth. And something else too, perhaps, that Klaus wasn't quite seeing. He took Haruki's hand and pressed it firmly to his lips for long seconds. The familiar blush that spread across Haruki's cheeks made Klaus' heart ache.

'Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind seeing you in those ceremonial robes. Headdress and all.'

Haruki laughed quietly and kept the thought to himself that it didn't sound like it would suit him in the least. Klaus touched his cheek, his smile folding his scar into a small lightning bolt near his left eye.

'War's over,' he said, just to hear it said aloud.

Haruki nodded slowly, trying to absorb it.

'Doesn't leave us with a whole lot to do, does it?'

'No,' Haruki agreed quietly, with a smile that grew from within, from where Klaus had kissed his hand and where his head rested in Haruki's lap. His hand moved to Klaus' jaw. The backs of his fingers brushed along Klaus' lips.

Klaus held Haruki's other hand firmly against his chest. Over the letter that was still in his front pocket.

The heron beyond the rushes spread its wings, white and expansive and startling for its size, and flapped them experimentally before edging towards the pond. Klaus turned his head to watch it take off and skim across the length of the water. The heron, the sagi, that had christened his plane.

And then he had an idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 66 coming up soon! Also a couple of quick notes:
> 
> Firstly, back on the topic of technology and television, we're now in the real world equivalent of the 50s Cold War era, so imagine little dusty clunky television sets with dials and black-and-white news. As for weapons, imagine that the Cold War ended in proper war and we actually used tactical nukes in combat. Can't believe real-life humanity made better choices than fiction, go us!
> 
> Secondly, I was wrong about my earlier estimation, there will be a few more chapters to go than I thought. BUT I am on schedule to keeping my birthday-deadline vow. So if you are bearing with me and the ever-increasing, never-ending chapters, please know I love you and I am not worthy of your patience. You guys are awesome!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the end of the civil war, finally! Thanks for reading, everyone! Xx


	66. Settle for Mandolins

Almost as soon as they arrived, they stopped paying attention to time. Time, for them, was only marked in sharps peaks of euphoria and valleys of sated contentment. At times, it was hard to believe that there were only two bodies in that hotel room and that they hadn’t dragged a pulsing, swirling mass of electricity into bed with them.

And so it was, even two weeks later.

‘Mmmh…’

Klaus withdrew his cock with an exacting slowness before pushing it back in. Haruki was lying before him on his side, Klaus’ hand hooked beneath one of his knees, pushing it up and away so he had a perfect view of where they were connected. He watched his cock re-emerge coated in a wet shine and streaks of white.

‘Every time I pull out, my come from earlier leaks out.’

Haruki simply moaned – long, low, mournful sounds – each time Klaus slowly pushed his whole, huge length back inside him. His hands were tied behind his back with the silk patterned neckerchief Klaus had bought for him at the piazza. His hips and chest bore fresh hickeys.

‘Must be a mess inside you, kid.’

‘Do it more,’ Haruki groaned. ‘Mess me up more.’

Klaus breathed deeply and carefully, in time with each slow thrust. Sweat glistened on his face as he stared down at Haruki.

‘You got it, Commander.’

They were in a charmingly dilapidated room, one of the last few that could be booked on short notice that also had a view of the sea. It was approaching evening and the sea was a contemplative blue, with the clouds above the horizon resplendent in rose-gold. In that time of year – the middle of scorching summer – the heat baked the ground and made the air thick and heavy.

The past two weeks had been a blur of moonlight and mountains, an inky, melancholy sea and a language that was loud and passionate; the polar opposite of the demure, unassuming softness of the east, even as far as rhythmical intonation. A nation in the west that Klaus had visited once before. A nation of mandolins and cobblestones and ivy growing over arched entrances of streets.

Klaus pulled out one final time and moved his hand over his own cock furiously before ejaculating with a groan over Haruki’s ass and lower back. With Haruki lying mostly on his side, the come trickled slowly off his skin towards the bed.

Instead of yielding to the temptation to fall forwards, Klaus reared back, eyelids heavy with the weight of his climax, to drink in the sight of Haruki lying there covered in his come, hands tied in the small of his back, breathing hard and eyes still lustful.

‘I gotta say,’ Klaus panted. ‘Seeing you wrecked like that makes me feel all kinds of guilty when I remember you as a cadet.’

This in turn drew a guilty half-smile from Haruki. Klaus leaned over him and kissed his mouth before he reached down to free his hands from the neckerchief that Klaus had slyly told him, in the piazza, would look good on him.

It was their final night in Cena.

* * *

For two weeks, whole hours and days were spent gorging on another’s bodies. Klaus revelled in what Haruki gave him; a passion wherein love and lust were one and the same and seemingly endless. He wanted to feel it again and again, until his every cell was saturated with Haruki’s submission, with his inexhaustible desire for Klaus.

They would awake as often after dawn as before dusk. They would sleep at various times through the night and day in various ways, in various contortions, but never far apart. Sometimes half of Haruki's body would be draped over Klaus or curled in against his chest, other times Klaus was pressed fully against Haruki's back, other times when the heat got too great, Haruki simply lay with his head on Klaus' outstretched forearm.

Only a few days after the _Sagi_ first touched down in that country, Klaus awoke in the middle of the night and discovered he was ravenous. He left Haruki sleeping soundly in bed to head downstairs and out of the hotel, encouraged by cheerful voices and sounds meandering up the cobblestone streets. A language that was direct and garrulous and lively.

He followed it to a restaurant that had stayed open well past closing time thanks to a birthday party that still showed no signs of winding down. In fact, Klaus walked past a loud, hearty rendition of _Santa Lucia,_ wine glasses raised in the air. He paid for a heavy bag of food and made his way back up to the hotel room.

The smell of food roused Haruki who also realised just how hungry he was. They ate straight from the aluminium containers on the bed itself.

‘When was the last time we ate?’ Klaus said, before he leaned over to deftly pluck the last meatball off Haruki’s fork with his mouth before Haruki could lift it to his own.

Haruki glanced up from his own mouthful and considered the question with some surprise. He shook his head, unable to remember.

They laughed at themselves in bemusement as they ate on the bed in the middle of the night, Haruki half naked and Klaus sprawled on his side nearby.

* * *

They were there on a whim of Klaus’. A whim that had translated into an entirely new land and this, their artfully shabby little room with wispy curtains; a room and a building that had most likely been built before the advent of electricity, if the wires running along the walls were any indication.

They were there, simply, because Haruki reminded Klaus of mandolins.

Like so much else that had happened to Haruki in the past week, the idea didn’t seem real, not when Klaus suggested it beneath the red maple leaves on the bank of the pond, nor when it became more and more likely the more they talked about it.

‘You never got a chance to fly the _Sagi,’_ Klaus began suddenly.

Haruki, who had been preoccupied with the way that ripples on the pond seemed to begin without any visible catalyst, glanced down at his lap in surprise. Klaus’ eyes were open and unexpectedly intense.

‘What?’

‘Back when you visited the cottage. I told you you should give the _Sagi_ a spin and we never had a chance.’

Haruki blinked. ‘That's true, but –'

‘Let’s do it now.’

‘Do what?’

‘Take her for a spin.’

Haruki was lost. ‘How? Where?’

The look in Klaus’ eyes sent a strange jolt through him.

‘Everywhere.’

He was thinking of a memory from before he had even touched Haruki. A warm fire crackled behind them and Haruki leaned against the edge of his desk, sipping scotch and listening with a smile as Klaus recounted stories of his travels. Klaus remembered how the stories came to life as he told them, in a way they hadn’t even when he had been there. 

Then he remembered his scattered, ebullient thoughts a few nights ago as he rode his bike through a rainy night, through a raging battle, in order to get to Haruki. Distant tinkling lights, little yellow flowers. And, for no reason, mandolins. Their sweet voices, the joy in each quivering note.

As he lay on Haruki’s lap beneath the maple tree, he spoke of it all again, his hands gesturing absently in the air above his face. He spoke of the nation where they played mandolins high and loud and continuously. The nation next to it with a language like whiplashes and where dancing went on well into the night. The colourful houses that faced open ocean in another land, and the small tear-drop shaped island where a dark-skinned girl had returned to marry her betrothed.

‘We could do it all,’ Klaus said, his chest suddenly filling with the thought, with the almost ethereal idea that he could see it again with Haruki beside him and really see it, this time, instead of ghosting through it. ‘We’d have to make a pit stop at the cottage to pick up the _Sagi_ and then we’d be in the sky from there.’ He lifted off Haruki’s lap and held the side of his face, scared suddenly of a reality where such a thing couldn’t happen. ‘What do you say?’

And he felt himself lift over the bank and rushes and pond when Haruki’s eyes looked like they were alight with the idea.

‘And this time you can take over the flying when I just want to kick my feet up,’ Klaus happily realised. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I nearly fell asleep at the controls over those nine months.’

‘Don’t tell me that,’ Haruki reproached, though the smile refused to leave his face.

‘We can leave today. Right now. Come on, say yes.’

At first, Haruki was too caught up in the prospect, too overwhelmed by Klaus’ sudden persistence, that he found it hard to say the word. And then something else occurred to him, like the jarring, wooden, alien sound of a rap on the door. All the things Meiji had said.

‘We – we might be needed. Maybe not now, but in a few weeks.’ He tried to see past the sudden wave of happiness that had rushed him. He tried to see where there were holes in their ship and found it was only too easy. His voice and gaze dropped. ‘When Rossi’s troops reach No Man’s Land, they'll be close to our border. Shoda’s been appointed to watch over the withdrawal, but it’ll be tense. There’s tens of thousands of retreating troops. And Meiji-sama told me that Rossi hasn’t responded to any of his calls since he took power.’

Klaus made a noise of frustration. ‘Asshole can’t forgive the east for abandoning Eurote on the Western Front, huh?’

He knew what Haruki meant about the tension of the retreat. It wasn’t only the physical proximity of the eastern soldiers watching over the retreating Euroteans, there were more poignant issues, issues like bruised pride and the shame of defeat, that were like dry tinder waiting for a spark. By all accounts, the revolution in Eurote was also coming to a head, their rebels fuelled by the victory of the _Hitobito_ in the east. Eurote was unstable, and curling her wounded arms back in across the length of the world.

And Klaus still had trouble trusting Shoda, who had been newly appointed Minister for Defence. There was a ruthlessness about him that put Klaus on edge.

‘So you’re saying we should stick around in case things go belly-up in No Man’s Land?’ he surmised.

Haruki looked at him, his eyes full and apologetic, as though he were somehow responsible for the state of the world.

But Klaus smiled again, refusing to let the ochre fire that had been lit within him to be put out so easily.

‘That gives us enough time.’

‘To go everywhere?’ Haruki said dubiously.

‘Not everywhere. Maybe one or two places.’ Klaus thought about it and he heard high, sweet notes. ‘I’ll settle for mandolins. And then we’ll come back, make sure Rossi goes home with his tail between his legs, and we’ll do the rest after that. Deal?’

Haruki stared at him for a while.

‘Come on, kid, you’re breaking my heart here. Say yes.’

‘Yes,’ Haruki said quietly.

Klaus’ eyes widened. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yes,’ Haruki repeated, feeling close to tears for no real reason. ‘Let’s – let’s do it.’

Klaus laughed aloud – a sound that carried across the pond – and kissed Haruki on a bank sheltered by rushes and red canopy.

And when Meiji replied to their request for a weeks-long escape in language that was nothing short of an imperial order, their spirits soared further.

* * *

There were two pit stops before they took to the sky. And the first was far less pleasant than the second.

Haruki already knew it didn’t bode well that Noboru Yamamoto had neglected to attend the emperor’s swearing-in ceremony, despite his invitation. So when he went to his childhood home in the north, in the province that had once been Tachibana’s and was now in the process of being handed over to a different shogun, he was nervous.

And grateful that Klaus had agreed to wait by the car that would take them to the train station. This was despite Klaus’ burning curiosity to meet Haruki’s father; a curiosity that edged into indignant protectiveness when he saw how the thought of seeing his father again made Haruki visibly anxious.

He watched from the driveway as the door was answered by a female servant. A man in his fifties then came to the door, supported by a set of crutches. Klaus remembered a very young Haruki having told him that Lieutenant Colonel Yamamoto had lost his leg in one of the wars.

Haruki was only in there for a few short minutes. When he came out, he was still holding the katana. He then stopped abruptly on his way to the car, turned back and left the katana by the closed front door.

They spoke of it only once during the three-day train ride. Even then, Haruki deftly managed to avoid telling Klaus exactly what had happened and what had been said. Klaus gathered only that Noboru Yamamoto, a staunch supporter of Emperor Tachibana, had been unable to see past the fact that his son had taken part in a mutiny and revolution against the reigning emperor. He gathered that Haruki had been accused of dishonouring the family name.

Noboru had also refused to accept Haruki’s katana and all it signified. All that had been conferred on their family name by grace of Haruki’s actions.

Klaus sat across from Haruki in the train carriage in stunned disbelief.

‘Your father's a prick,’ he said without flinching.

‘He’s not so bad,’ Haruki said after a pause, in a tone that suggested he knew how his words would sound. ‘Our family name and our country’s honour have always mattered to him more than anything. He was a good soldier. His men respected him.’

‘Doesn’t change the fact that he’s a prick. And don't get me started on how much you've done for your goddamn country and your family name. He's out of his mind if he can't see that.’

There was a long silence. Klaus couldn’t help but notice that in some way, the katana and his father represented the same thing to Haruki. A lingering, deep-seated sense of unworthiness.

‘Don't tell me you believe anything he said?’

‘No, but –' Haruki faltered, wondering how he could make Klaus understand. ‘I understand why he said it. He has the right to say it.’

Klaus stared incredulously. It was the first time he had felt that specific barrier between them, the kind which owed to the fact that he had been raised half a world away. A culture and an upbringing which, in many ways, would always be foreign to him. He wondered at how Haruki was able to see Tachibana as a tyrant but was unable to see the same in his own father.

He blew air out of his cheeks in frustration, hands deep in his pockets.

‘Where the hell did you even come from, kid?’ he mused aloud. ‘With a father like that?’

Haruki tried a tentative smile. ‘Ukiyo, my old servant, used to say my mother and I were alike. I think he was just being nice, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She was… warm. And selfless. Ukiyo said she made people feel better just by being around her. I remember it like that, too.’

Klaus raised his eyebrows in slight surprise. ‘So that’s where you get it from.’

A typically dismissive smile. ‘I'm not selfless like her.’ He then hesitated, wondering if he could admit to a small, dark thought that had crept into him long ago. ‘I was nine when she got sick,’ he said, his voice low. ‘And on the day I found out how bad it was, I remember my first thought was that I was afraid. Not for her, but for myself. I was afraid of being left alone. And being left alone with my father.’

Klaus’ heart gave a painful twinge. It was as gentle a confession as it was unexpected. And it even carried a faint memory of his own fears from long ago.

Haruki smiled imploringly. ‘How selfish is that?’

‘Kid, I’m about to turn thirty-seven and even I’m scared at the thought of being left alone with your father.’ _Scared I’ll knock him into the middle of next week, more like,_ he thought sourly. ‘So I don’t want to imagine what it would have been like for a nine-year-old.’

That brought about a small chuckle which lifted Klaus’ spirits for a moment. Then Klaus himself grew slightly more sombre.

_I was afraid of being left alone._

‘Besides,’ he said, eyes moving to the farmlands zooming past the window. ‘I had the same thought when Taki got sick.’

His most daunting foe to date. The prospect of living out the rest of his days without his master.

Haruki looked at him properly then. It was like they had unexpectedly turned the corner and discovered a fragment of sorrow and guilt that they shared.

‘Anyway,’ Klaus said slightly gruffly, annoyed again at the thought of Yamamoto Senior. ‘I know it doesn’t work the same way where you grew up, but the way I see it, parents have to earn their kids’ respect, just as much as the other way around. And your father doesn’t deserve you, kid. Not by a mile and a half.’

Although Haruki’s smile of gratitude was sincere, Klaus could tell his words didn’t get through to him.

But he hoped he knew, by then, how to deal with that particular barrier. He swallowed his indignation and his inability to understand and let it slide.

The rest of the train journey passed by without incident. Haruki had fallen asleep by the time they skirted the edge of what had once been Roskilde, the tracks having been rebuilt to avoid the fallout radius. But Klaus was glad of that private moment. He stared out the window and the sunlight brought out the gleam in his eyes.

The second stop was the cottage, where they found a long, lovely note from Claudia on the kitchen table beneath Heinrich’s old model airplane. Klaus glanced down the short hallway, suddenly anxious about entering the room that had been his and Taki’s for eight years.

_When I’m done flying, I’ll find someone, like you found Papa, who’ll bring me home. But we’ll keep a plane in the backyard so we can fly anywhere in the world whenever we feel like it._

It was something he and Taki had never found the time for.

He and Haruki didn’t stay long, despite the allure of the unique, self-contained peace of the wheat fields that Klaus hadn’t seen for a full year. There was a stronger pull awaiting at the end of a makeshift runway, one that few people in the world could understand. But one that Klaus and Haruki happened to share.

And it was with an entirely new kind of joy that Klaus let Haruki take the pilot’s seat for the first leg of the journey.

* * *

He was good. He was one of the best Klaus had ever seen. He handled the _Sagi_ with an ease that he seemed to have been born with. Klaus even had the same thought that Ryoumei had had; that it was a shame for him to have left the sky behind.

There was even a moment where Haruki spun the plane around on its head completely before righting her again. Though the move was also a favourite of Klaus’, it was the first time he hadn’t been at the controls when it happened. He gripped his seat and felt his heart and stomach lurch before he heard Haruki’s laugh.

‘Yeah, laugh it up, kid,’ Klaus called over the roar of the single propeller. ‘We’ll see who’s laughing when I get you alone in a hotel room.’

They flew over a luminescent blanket of clouds, the kind that fooled all the senses into believing it was solid and tangible. Klaus stared out the window at his leisure, enjoying the gentle drone of the  _Sagi,_ her steady cruising and the steady hand that guided her. He was almost regretful when they approached their refuelling stop and Haruki gently dipped them through clouds that were revealed to be nothing more than a beautiful illusion.

After several more hours, they landed in the heart of their destination – the bustling capital itself, where all roads in the world were said to lead.

But they only remained for a single night. One of the first things Klaus saw in the capital was a series of posters plastered along a wall. They featured a singer named Dino Marzano; a favourite of Klaus’ father and whose amiable, drunken croons had permeated Klaus’ childhood. Well into his sixties now, Marzano was still very much crooning, and would be doing so in a live show the following day. In a small southern town called Cena.

‘We’re in the wrong city,’ Klaus said simply.

Still, tired from the journey, they retired for the night. Haruki’s heart lifted at the simplest of things; the heat that simmered pleasantly on the streets; the smart suits and fedoras; the sight of Klaus leaning his elbows on the counter, testing out the few foreign phrases he knew on the receptionist; the gentle dip in the middle of the stone steps leading up to their room, as though traffic had worn a path there over the centuries.

The following morning, Klaus awoke with Haruki half on top of him. He checked his watch and woke Haruki gently.

‘We’ve got to get a move on, kid. Check-out’s in five.’

Haruki made a sleepy sound of acquiescence and reluctance and began to move away. But Klaus' hands absently travelled down his back to his ass where he squeezed and pushed him down, grinding Haruki's pelvis against Klaus' own. Haruki's thoughts of protest dissolved before they had even fully formed. His head swam, still slightly bogged down by sleep. He let out a small moan. And suddenly their cocks were both at attention, rubbing against one another through the thin fabric of Haruki's briefs.

‘Or,’ Klaus suggested, his voice tight, ‘we could pay the late check-out fee.’

‘Okay,’ Haruki breathed immediately, and Klaus rolled him over onto his back.

* * *

Haruki didn’t know what his father did with the katana. He knew he ought to have taken it back with him so that he might keep it in his own home, on his own property, when he returned to the east and purchased one. But it felt like a burden he was happy to leave behind. A childhood fantasy left at the steps of his childhood home.

And where they were now, where chivalry and honour meant different things, things that didn’t involve the gravity of lifelong vows, the thought of asking Klaus about knighthood was pushed further and further into the background, until it was almost completely indistinguishable from fantasy. It didn’t seem important or real among the vibrant colours of the country Klaus had selected, apparently, with Haruki in mind. He couldn’t help but feel as though it was all there for him.

Cena was only a few hours’ drive from the capital and, with no airfield nearby, there wasn’t any point in flying. So they piled into a rental – a clunky, endearing thing in chipped red paint that Klaus grew attached to – and headed south.

Haruki noticed that while Klaus maintained a subconscious diligence at the controls of a cockpit, he drove with a carelessness that was very becoming. Haruki's memories of their hours on the road were filled with images of Klaus leaning back on the seat, his forearm hooked over the steering wheel, his other arm lying along the edge of the open window, a lazy smile beneath eyes that seemed only half-focused on the road that unwound before them.

The countryside they passed was breathtaking. That part of the nation, south of the capital, had always been protected by a divine hand and shielded from war. Vineyards were awash with the kind of thick, honey-coloured sunlight they had seen once before, now magnified and stretching all the way to terracotta houses and mountains. Posies and poppies covered hillsides in swathes.

While Haruki drove, Klaus would nap, lying low in his seat, or turn his face flat against the seat back and reach over to squeeze Haruki’s thigh.

And Haruki would try hard not to imagine where he had been a month ago, or even a week ago. He threatened to float above himself if he gave in to those thoughts, and he intended to burrow as far into his present reality as he could.

There was a point during their drive, right as they approached Cena, when Klaus thought he spied a small yellow clump of those same bright, open flowers that had grown in a corner of the compound. He regretted that they were pressed for time or he would have turned and plucked one in the hopes of finding out what it was and what it was called. Haruki suggested they could do so on the drive back. He wondered why Klaus had been so curious.

When they drove past two weeks later, however, they couldn’t find the flowers again, no matter how hard they looked and no matter how sure Klaus was that they were in the same place.

* * *

On their first night in Cena, they dressed the part for Marzano’s show. Klaus was pleased to see Haruki’s glossy black vest and his hair glistening and swept back, except for those few rogue strands. It was a smoky bar filled with chatter and laughter – voices speaking too fast for either Klaus or Haruki to keep up.

And Haruki was captivated instantly by the man of the hour himself. Dino Marzano shed his old age as soon as he sat on the stool in a cloud of cigarette smoke and brought the mike near his mouth. His voice was butter-smooth and rolled like the countryside they had passed that day.

Jazz refrains melded almost effortlessly into tango beats and back again. And when the mandolins struck up their tune, sweet and earnest, Klaus glanced at Haruki and the sound was engraved forever with that enraptured look on Haruki's face as he listened to the music.

During the intermission, Haruki stood at the bar waiting for their order to be served when he spied, from across the room, two pretty women approaching the table where Klaus still sat.

Surprised, and more than a little fascinated, Haruki watched.

In only a few seconds, it appeared Klaus was inviting them to sit with him. Haruki almost laughed out loud. The jealousy he felt was benign and he was strangely prideful that he even had the right to feel it. The bartender pushed his drinks towards him but Haruki remained where he was, pleased to let Klaus have his moment.

Once the women were gone, Haruki came to the table and placed Klaus’ scotch before him.

‘Someone’s popular,’ he said with a smile.

Klaus gave him a look. ‘Someone certainly is.’

Moments later, Haruki turned to see the women approach again, bringing their own drinks. Both were dark-haired, the shorter one with a kind of dainty, polished prettiness and the taller one flaunting a heavy-lidded sultriness.

‘You must be Haruki,’ said the former said, to Haruki's complete surprise. She spoke slowly so he would understand. ‘Your friend has told us you are from the east.’

‘I – yes, I am,’ Haruki said, almost forgetting the most basic of foreign words in his surprise.

‘May I sit?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’

Once her friend sat down as well, Haruki turned to Klaus in confusion and met a wicked gaze that glinted in the smoky bar light.

‘It turns out that the lovely Miss Carlotta has always been fascinated with the east and has had her eye on you since you came in,’ Klaus drawled. ‘I told her you weren’t married and, to my knowledge, you haven’t promised the next dance to any other pretty little thing around here, so she just might have a chance.’

Carlotta found herself becoming even more besotted with the handsome Easterner after witnessing the prominent blush that spread across his face.

Just as Haruki turned to her and wondered how on Earth he might turn her down, the band began another number and Dino Marzano stepped up to the stool amidst a fresh round of applause.

‘Better hurry,’ Klaus urged, inclining his head.

And so Haruki, casting a disbelieving and doleful look at Klaus, was left with no choice but to be led to the small space before the stage where dancers had already milled. He looked down at the increasingly confident expression on his partner's face and tried to remember the steps to that particular style. It had been a long time indeed since he had been out with Ryoumei and their friends to bars in the west. On top of that, though he no longer limped, his injury was barely a week old and his leg was still stiff.

Klaus watched as Haruki’s movements became more fluid the more he relaxed. He even glimpsed Haruki leaning in sometimes with a smile to hear whatever Carlotta tried saying in his ear over the music. Klaus' attention was occasionally diverted by the slender Amelia of the sultry lips and eyes, who remained pointedly at the table beside him and whose next drink he happily bought.

The door of their hotel room creaked loudly and banged worryingly hard against the flimsy wall as Klaus and Haruki swung heavily through it later that night, joined at the mouth and hips, bow ties and buttons of vests quickly coming undone. It was their first night in the dilapidated little room overlooking the sea.

Klaus held him against the wall and trailed kisses down his neck and chest, pausing to suck at the skin above his nipple and leave a fresh mark that made Haruki gasp.

Once Haruki's pants dropped to the floor, Klaus kicked them away. He lifted Haruki’s left leg up and hooked it over his arm, feeling Haruki’s heel against his lower back. His cock strained painfully against the underside of Haruki’s ass, nudging at its mark. Haruki shivered and clung to Klaus' suit jacket.

‘Imagine if your little girlfriend saw you now,’ Klaus hissed through gritted teeth. ‘Pressed against a wall. About to be fucked. I wonder how she’d react.’

Even as Haruki’s heart pounded erratically at the familiar hoarseness in Klaus' voice, he managed a breathy chuckle. ‘Maybe... she’d want to join in.’

Klaus gave a loud, surprised laugh. It was a boldness that he had seen sporadically from Haruki over the weeks. ‘Hell, at the rate we’re going, we could probably swing something like that, if you’re game.’

Haruki laughed again. ‘No, thanks.’

Klaus’ eyes twinkled. ‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Suit yourself.’

And he pushed in and Haruki clung to his back again and moaned far too loudly given their proximity to the hallway. Klaus lifted him completely after a few thrusts and muffled all ensuing moans with his mouth.

It was from that point on that time began behaving strangely; unbeholden to the ticking arms of clocks or the movement of celestial bodies in the days and weeks to come.

A few nights after that, on the bed that was occasionally brushed by the wispy white curtains, hours had passed during which they would keep reviving one another, climax and arousal overlapping. Sweat plastered Haruki’s hair to his forehead as Klaus plunged into him from above and his mind was long gone, a mental state somehow resembling the tangled state of the sheets near his head that were gripped in his hand.

Klaus then heard him mumble a few words that registered far back in his mind. It took every ounce of his self-control – a reining in of the wolf that almost physically hurt – but he managed to slow down and then stop. Panting like he had run a mile, he leaned down on his elbows.

Haruki was confused. ‘What's wrong?’

Klaus raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You told me to stop.’

Seconds ago, Haruki's eyes were closed, one hand on Klaus' abdomen and the other on the sheets, and he had mumbled, his voice thin and staggered, _‘Don’t... please, I can't –'_

Haruki blinked and his own words came back to him through the resin net of pleasure. And his flush increased.

'No, that was... I didn't mean stop...'

How could he explain the feeling that he was about to burst at the seams? That he felt spent and wrung and still full, that he was overwhelmed by pleasure that didn't seem to have borders or edges or end. It had been a subconscious, breathless testament, not a command. He couldn't wrap his tongue around any of those feelings but the devilish grin above him belied Klaus' intuition.

The next thrust invaded him to the hilt and Haruki’s body tensed and quivered.

Klaus thrust hard and fast with his full length, slapping noisily against Haruki’s flesh. He noticed that it sometimes seemed to overwhelm Haruki to look him in the eye for too long. He felt the heat from Haruki's passage intensify with each thrust, his body grasping at Klaus' cock, aching for him, and he finally released inside him almost at the same moment that Haruki turned his face to the side, neck arched and tears leaking, and came too. Klaus stayed inside, pulsing his cock gently, making sure each drop of his come landed somewhere deep, and rubbed his face against the side of Haruki's neck, feeling the short, soft sounds emanating from his throat.

* * *

They also discovered the simple, poignant joys of the times spent when they were spent; utterly drained of sexual energy. It was a different flavour. Klaus would inspect every inch of Haruki's burn scars with his eyes and hands, until he had committed every glossy ripple and detail to memory. Haruki would move over Klaus' arm and lie against his chest, lifting his face to nuzzle his neck in the place that always made Klaus either growl softly or lie still and breathe out like he was coming to rest after a lifetime of struggles.

And their conversations would move from heavy things – things that Haruki relayed from his talks with Meiji which would leave long thoughtful silences stretching between them – all the way down the spectrum to frolicsome nothings.

Klaus once turned an inquisitive eye on Haruki as they lay in the blazing afternoon heat. The sun sparkled with an angry glare on the sea outside.

‘How come you and Kolya never…?’

He trailed off. Though slightly taken aback by the question, Haruki thought about it.

‘It just never felt like that. For either of us, I think. He always seemed like an older brother or something.’

Klaus grunted. ‘The fact that he even exists hurts my ego just a little. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay with the idea that there’s some guy out there better than me at everything.’

Something then occurred to Haruki. He would never know what made him think of it, much less say it out loud. In fact, he hesitated for several seconds.

‘Back when I first spoke to him, in the hospital room in Eurote, he... wasn’t wearing any clothes.’

‘Not helping, kid.’

‘It was only for a second, but I – saw everything.’ He smiled and looked at Klaus as emphatically as he could. ‘And based on what I can remember... there’s one way that you surpass him.’*

A second later, Klaus’ expression transformed.

‘Really?’

Haruki’s smile widened. ‘I’m not saying it’s an easy win, but it’s a win.’

Klaus laughed gleefully and rolled on top of him. ‘I don’t even care if you’re just lying to make me feel better.’

Haruki’s assurances to the contrary were lost in the kiss.

Later that day, Haruki sat on the edge of the bed and Klaus sat on the floor before him leaning against his legs as he experimented with strumming patterns on his little mandolin. Haruki had bought it for him, citing an early birthday present as an excuse, when he saw Klaus examining it closely an open market fair.

He loved the sight of Klaus’ huge fingers curled around its slender neck.

‘I didn’t know you could play.’

‘A few chords. I grew up playing the violin, though,’ he added.

Haruki was surprised. The violin didn’t seem to suit him.

‘I didn’t like it at first,’ Klaus said, echoing his thoughts. ‘My father made us all take lessons. Claudia was always better than me. But after a while, it grew on me.’ He remembered the trance he had fallen into when the graceful, long-drawn notes were created by his own hands through string and bow, speaking of a sadness and seriousness that seemed beyond him and made him feel humble.

‘And in the first war, one of my comrades, Enrico, had a little mandolin with him. I tinkered around with it and liked it pretty much on the spot.’ He tilted his head back against Haruki's knees and looked up at him. ‘Suits me better, don’t you think?’

‘I guess,’ Haruki said uncertainly. He was suddenly taken with the thought of a young Klaus playing the violin with his eyes closed.

Then his attention was taken up by the melody that Klaus began to play.[*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOMmwyfPEio) It began with tentative notes, notes that peeked out uncertainly, took careful steps out into the daylight. And then a long, beautiful riff followed. The rest of the song played with a sombreness that Haruki didn’t think a mandolin was capable of. A cautious hope and an aching sorrow.

‘That was beautiful,’ Haruki said, strangely overcome, when Klaus played the final ringing note.

‘It's a song I used to play on the violin. Not bad on this little thing, is it?’

Despite his tone, his heart was even heavier than Haruki’s in that moment. He wished, suddenly, that he hadn’t played that song.

He felt better when Haruki slid to the floor slowly and knelt by him. The mandolin was put aside, making a few clunking sounds, as Haruki kissed him and swung a leg over Klaus’ lap.

But he sank back into that forlorn sense of urgency and longing afterwards, when he watched Haruki sleeping and thought of all the parts of the song that were about him, and the parts that weren't.

And then, for no real reason, Hans swam across his mind. Hans was a hate that had grown for ten years in the shadows. Haruki was a love that had done the same. He wondered at how people could be so different. And here, now, how Klaus should be so lucky.

* * *

Their ability to speak the language improved steadily over the next few days. They asked for directions to the best location to observe a fireworks show that would take place above the water and Klaus was pleased that he followed most of the animated, rapid-fire response.

When they took their seats at a beachfront cafe among others who had also gathered for the show, Klaus told Haruki that he had first learned when he spoke to Enrico, and then picked up a little more the last time he was in that country alone.

He then asked Haruki where he had learned what he knew and didn’t expect the question to leave him looking awkward.

‘From, uh, one of my instructors at flight school. He was from here, and he spoke the language sometimes, even in lectures.’

He suddenly picked up the napkin from the table and became strangely interested in it. Klaus narrowed his eyes.

‘What was his name?’

‘Corelli. Captain Vincenzo Corelli.’

Klaus definitely heard it then, in the way Haruki said his name. They were both silent for several seconds that seemed inexplicably tense.

‘He's not one of the eight, is he?’

Haruki's nervous glance betrayed him immediately. Klaus felt it again, all of the same jealousy with none of the illicit thrill that accompanied the last time they spoke about it.

‘You slept with your flight instructor?’

Haruki glanced around in concern before remembering no one around them could understand Klaus.

‘How old was he?’ Klaus demanded.

‘I'm not sure. In his forties, I think.’

Klaus glared. ‘How old were you?’

‘Seventeen,’ Haruki said, his voice small. He felt distinctly grateful that they were in a public place.

Klaus tried to take a calming breath. ‘Tell me he wasn't your first.’

Again, Haruki answered with only a look. Klaus suddenly and gravely regretted making the decision to come to that country, of all places in the world, if it would inspire even the slightest association with a memory like that. He imagined Haruki lying back, tremulous and uncertain, as large, groping hands removed his clothes for the first time.

He took out his anger on the image of the faceless captain that swam before his eyes, and on his coffee when it arrived.

‘The geezer should be sacked for sleeping with his students,’ he muttered before throwing back a bitter mouthful of macchiato. ‘Sleazy bastard.’

Despite his nervousness, Haruki found his mind was suddenly playing back images of a kindly smile. A heavy chest and a booming laugh. And he felt a strange need to defend his memory of Corelli.

‘It only happened once. And afterwards we were still on good terms. He was the one who passed me on my test flight. He even bought me a pair of cuff links as a gift when I graduated.’

Klaus stared, jealousy raging afresh. ‘The little brass airplanes?’

Haruki was startled that Klaus should remember such a detail.

‘Yes.’

The rest of the macchiato was downed and Klaus made a face.

‘If we come across a single guy named Corelli while we’re here, I'm killing him.’

‘I think he's still back in your country. And he’s married now,’ Haruki said idly, remembering something Ryoumei had said.

He then looked up to see Klaus sitting low in his chair, still looking very much disgruntled. He absently thumbed the edge of his coffee cup and wondered if what he was about to say would help or aggravate.

‘He reminded me a lot of you.’

He felt a golden gaze land on him.

‘And if I had known that there was the smallest chance that you and I would ever –' He cut himself off when his face began to feel hot on cue. ‘I wouldn’t have – not just with Vincenzo, with none of the others – I wouldn’t even have considered...’

Klaus’ jealousy didn't last much longer after that, after seeing the way Haruki stared into his latte, and the way his slender fingers nervously ran along its rim.

He sighed. ‘That little routine of yours will only work another four, five times, tops.’

Haruki laughed at the same moment that the first firework was let off.

The entire beachfront was engulfed in loud, dazzling lights, interspersed with dependable sounds of awe from the crowd and children’s delighted laughter. Even more than the lights above, Klaus was transfixed with their reflection on the water. The dark surface was suddenly a canvas for fluorescent and technicolour shades that seemed unreal. He wondered how deep beneath the surface that light would penetrate. How far down you would have to dive before you couldn’t even see a glimmer from above; where it was black again in all directions.

As they returned to the hotel, Haruki thought to ask about Klaus’ first time. Klaus smiled as he remembered a late night on a riverbank when he was sixteen, with a girl who was a year older.

‘I can’t believe that was more than twenty years ago.’

He lay back on the bed and his smile faded slightly. The faintest of frowns took its place when a pulsing pain began in the back of his head. He let out a quiet, frustrated grunt when he realised it must have been the fireworks. He hoped the statute of limitations on shell blast trauma would soon run out.

After only a short pause, he felt Haruki slide onto the bed close to him. He lifted his head slightly before laying it back in Haruki’s lap. Then he felt fingers at his temples. Tracing around his ears to the base of his skull.

He exhaled and kept his eyes closed.

‘How do you do that?’ he murmured vaguely.

_How do you know exactly where the pain is?_

Haruki worked his fingers slowly into Klaus' hair, parting strands that were both coarse and soft at the same time, the colour of wheat, smelling faintly of cedar or something else woody and earthy. They fell asleep like that, Haruki lying across the pillows and Klaus’ head in his lap; the first and only time they fell asleep wearing clothes.

* * *

Sometimes, little crevasses opened up before them unexpectedly, even there, in the hideaway provided by their shabby little room with the wispy white curtains.

One night, Klaus had a nightmare like the ones he used to have, this time with a fresh set of images to add to those that were tried and true. He dreamed that Haruki had died that day in Hokane when Murakumo was destroyed. In a cruel twist, it had been nothing more than a dream that made Klaus believe Haruki had actually survived, that Klaus had found him and kissed him on that smoke-filled street.

He then heard a gunshot echoing around a marble lobby, the bullet itself, rather than just the sound, bouncing off each wall before entering Nakamori’s head. In its path, it had also gone through Klaus’ head but left him intact, with nothing more than a pounding headache in the base of his skull.

Tachibana dragging himself across a floor that was littered with the bodies of all of the men Klaus had lost in the first war. Hans sitting on the emperor’s vast desk, examining the bullet wound in his forehead with some curiosity. His grey gaze falling on Klaus just as Klaus realised he was lying awake in a hotel room, holding Taki’s limp form in his arms.

His pulse and breathing didn’t settle for long seconds even after Haruki roused him and kept a bracing hand on his shoulder. Klaus blinked in the darkness, in the stifling heat, and realised he needed to get out. Just for a breather, just for a moment.

But Haruki’s grip on his arm was suddenly stronger than he knew. Klaus was pulled back and a hand pulled his face around, even when he was straining to be on the other side of the door.

‘Tell me,’ Haruki said, his own heart hammering over the awful groans that had woken him and the way Klaus’ face was drenched in sweat that had nothing to do with the heat.

When Klaus didn't respond, Haruki urged him again. It reminded Klaus of something Haruki had said in his gaze when he stood between Klaus and his bike in front of the embassy. Something that tried telling Klaus he no longer needed to fight any of it alone.

Like he did then, Klaus needed a few more seconds to come back to himself, and to Haruki. And then he sank onto Haruki’s chest, pushing them both back onto the pillows, and felt Haruki’s arms loop around his back. He lay still and heard Haruki’s heartbeat beneath his ear and thought of how it was a real organ, a real thing keeping Haruki alive, just a few millimetres away from his own skin.

Haruki was waiting for him to speak. Klaus could tell. That final image in his nightmare of Taki lying dead in his arms refused to leave him.

‘Kid,’ he said, in a voice so low Haruki had to strain to hear. ‘There are some things I can't talk about.’

And Klaus heard so much of Taki in his own words that he almost smiled at the gods’ twisted sense of humour.

‘Yet,’ he added quietly, hoping it was the truth.

‘That’s okay,’ Haruki said, after a beat.

‘I wish you had a better version of me,’ Klaus said suddenly, giving words to a thought he didn’t even realise he had been harbouring. A version of himself before any of it had happened. Someone Haruki truly deserved. ‘Someone young and whole and not dented all over the fucking place.’

Haruki didn’t reply at first, but the way his arms tightened was enough to tell Klaus exactly what he thought of that proposition.

'I love you,' Haruki reminded him.

There would always be a part of Klaus that he could never give. The part that had searched for Taki his whole life, lived with him and died with him. They both knew that. And Haruki didn't care. He would settle for the smallest part of Klaus, whatever he could give. He would rather have that than all of anyone else.

* * *

The love that burned in Klaus scared him sometimes. He watched Haruki and wanted simultaneously to protect him from the world and kiss his lips gently and make him cling desperately to Klaus’ neck and clothes and make him laugh and run hands through his hair and slam him face-first against a wall and fuck him until he trembled and gasped and came. It was a sharp, violent clash of chords inside him that newly defined him and made him feel as though he was high without having touched a vial. He often wondered how it was possible that he had gone from the bottom of a pit to the happiest he had ever been in his entire life.

And yet...

The memories he was forging with Haruki were brighter than any he had ever hoped for, especially in a life that had seemed cursed since the very first war. And yet he couldn’t help but remember the eight years’ worth of memories he had forged with Taki, in that little niche they had carved in their intertwined fates. At times he felt almost weary at the thought that he was doing so all over again.

But thoughts like that he tried to banish immediately. They hailed from a time before he had read Taki’s words in the letter that, even at that moment, wasn’t far away – folded carefully in his suitcase. This was what Taki wanted. This was what he, Klaus, wanted.

He would close his eyes in moments like that and try to find peace again.

* * *

About a week into their stay, it became so unbearably hot that, as an act of desperation, they moved the bed to the very centre of the room to better harness the occasional breeze that disturbed the wispy curtain. The bed became the centre of their lives in that little room, whether they were in it or around it.

The water beyond the window one afternoon was such a light, glazed blue that it almost looked white. A couple strolled out onto the little jetty, the girl's floral print dress fluttering about her ankles.

Haruki turned from the window to see Klaus sitting on the edge of the bed, his shirt open and the mandolin in his hands again. He strummed a different song, a more buoyant one, with long chords that dragged for several bars before moving on. Haruki thought he recognised it.

Klaus sang softy as he experimented with the chord progression.

‘Buona sera, signore, buona sera…’

Haruki smiled. It was the closing number of Dino Marzano’s show.[*](https://youtu.be/J9LK2UsLMS0)

‘It’s _signorina,’_ he pointed out.

Klaus kept strumming as he glanced up. ‘You’re a _signore,_ not a _signorina,’_ he replied suavely.

Haruki’s heart skipped a beat and he chuckled as he sat on the bed.

‘But _signore_ doesn’t rhyme with _buona sera.’_

‘Rhyme is overrated.’

By then, Klaus had figured out the rest of the chords and he strummed from the top, eyes on the strings.

‘In the morning, signore, we’ll go walking, where the mountains help the moon come into sight...’

Haruki was torn between closing his eyes and keeping them open. Klaus' voice was less refined than Marzano’s but several times deeper and richer.

‘In the meantime, let me tell you that I love you.’

With only the mandolin accompanying his voice, with none of the pomp of the brass band, it sounded like a different song. Haruki suddenly felt as though they and the white curtain and the white sea were alone in the world.

‘Buona sera, signore... kiss me goodnight.’

It was like a liquid charge, the blood rush, the desire and the adrenaline, all from a simple kiss that deepened. And Haruki was almost regretful and guilty over how quickly the bare, innocent words of the song, the pureness of the melody, became something else so quickly.

And how two hours could fly by, mandolin forgotten and Haruki straining to keep his voice down before the open window. He was on top, riding Klaus with an arm braced behind him on Klaus’ thigh for support. Klaus had already come inside him three times over the past two hours, his cock hardening under Haruki’s hands or lips after only short interludes in between.

Klaus watched Haruki’s body move and had the strange feeling that Haruki had been designed, his whole body down to his burns, simply for him. He watched Haruki’s taut abdomen contract with each plunge, as though it felt the impact of Klaus’ cock. And then Haruki ground down over him with new vigour. His moans sounded tortured.

‘Fuck, yes,’ Klaus growled. ‘Use my dick to make yourself come.’

‘Ahhn, oh… so good. Oh, I’m going to come again.’

‘Don’t hold back. Come hard around my cock.’ And Klaus felt his own climax rushing to meet him. ‘You ready to take another load?’

‘Ugh, Klaus! Yes… _yes!’_

Klaus thrust up and lifted his hips off the bed and came at the same moment that Haruki ground down as low as he could go, feeling like his come had been forced out of his body entirely due to the pressure.

And suddenly, with the full length of Klaus’ cock pressing into him at an angle that was almost painful, Haruki lifted himself up suddenly and quickly. As Klaus watched, Haruki let out a low groan and, without warning, all of Klaus’ come poured out of him, dribbling onto his cock. Haruki’s eyes were closed and he was trembling. His cock was still twitching and spurting. He was still coming, Klaus realised.

‘Fuck,’ was all Klaus could manage, sounding almost numb.

Still shaking, Haruki tried to move forward towards Klaus.

‘Shit. How many loads is that pouring out of you?’

‘Four,’ Haruki moaned.

The sound of his voice sent yet another flare to his dick and Klaus found he was still stiff. He pulled Haruki’s limp body towards him, both surprised and turned on by how weak he was from his climax. He pinned him face-down on the bed.

‘I'm going to fuck you again, kid,’ he hissed in Haruki’s ear.

Again, Haruki could only moan. Klaus moved his semen-drenched cock to Haruki’s hole.

‘I'm going to fuck you with my own come that's already been inside you. Going to breed you again, Wolfpup.’

‘Nnngh, yes,’ Haruki whispered.

Klaus pushed in again and Haruki was mute with pleasure. A sharp, stinging slap from Klaus across his ass made him cry out properly.

Afterwards, they lay in a familiar stupor that was slightly more dazed than normal.

‘You're going to kill this old man, kid,’ Klaus said as he panted. ‘I didn't think I could come five times in two hours.’

Haruki's mind was spinning slightly. He also had no idea sex could be like that. He felt like it was surely too much, too strong, particularly if it was followed by the way Klaus looked at him then.

‘You’re not old,’ was all he could get out, along with an exhausted smile.

* * *

Time behaved oddly right up until their final night in Cena. It seemed like the day arrived with a ruthless abruptness, even though the days in the interim had been stretched to life-ages.

Though their duties in the east would soon call, they were bound first for the cottage. In the note she left on the kitchen table, Claudia had asked for Klaus to be at the cottage in time for his birthday, since it had been over a year since she had last seen him. Thoughts of the farm and the rose garden and the smell of sandalwood softened the blow of having to leave.

And yet there was a certain heaviness in Klaus’ heart, and Haruki’s too, which their latest bout of daring, breathless lovemaking had assuaged only mildly.

Klaus reared back, eyelids heavy with the weight of his climax, to drink in the sight of Haruki lying there covered in his come, hands tied in the small of his back, breathing hard and eyes still lustful.

‘I gotta say,’ Klaus panted. ‘Seeing you wrecked like that makes me feel all kinds of guilty when I remember you as a cadet.’

This in turn drew a guilty half-smile from Haruki. Klaus leaned over him and kissed his mouth before he reached down to free his hands from the neckerchief that Klaus had slyly told him, in the piazza, would look good on him.

He passed Haruki a towel before collapsing onto the pillows, eyes closed. Haruki wiped himself off before something occurred to him. Something Klaus had said in passing weeks ago. He hesitated.

‘Wasn’t Taki-sama also a child when you met him?’

Klaus smiled with his eyes still closed. ‘I was a kid too, though. Plus, I didn't know him back then, not like I knew you at fourteen. All I did was help Taki pick some flowers for his headdress.’

Haruki lay down quietly beside him. He mulled over Klaus’ tone, which was lighter than it usually was on the rare occasion he spoke about Taki.

So Haruki tried, as gently as he could.

‘You never told me exactly how you met Taki-sama.’

Klaus opened his eyes halfway and stared at the far side of the room.

‘I guess not.’

Violet clumps of flowers fluttering in the breeze, so beautiful he thought he had wandered into a dream. He told Haruki about it, in simple words that nevertheless brought the scene to life.

He even told Haruki about how he thought of that moment the first time he saw Taki again in Luckenwalde ten years later.

There was a gentle silence.

And then, before Klaus knew it, he was telling Haruki everything that he and Taki went through in that year. The drills, the late nights on the rooftop of Luckenwalde, the books they filed in the library together. All the way until Klaus got on the train with him bound for the east.

Haruki's eyes drank up every word. So Klaus kept going.

Haruki learned about how Klaus' first six months in the east had been marked by confusion and pain as Taki pushed him away despite all that Klaus had given up for him. How in Klaus' anguish, the wolf had emerged, unrestrained, and how it had taken Taki by force. Haruki's breath caught in his throat at the awful echo. He heard the pain in Klaus' voice, the self-loathing that would never go away.

And still Klaus kept going, his words like a gently moving river that couldn't be stopped. His voice softened when Taki rescued him from Hasebe’s sword, and when they faced Katsuragi together.

He then spoke of the following six months when Hans Regenwalde hurtled into their midst with a relic of something that had died in ancient times. He spoke of how drastically everything changed in those months, including winning the war and almost losing Taki to Hans in No Man’s Land.

‘But that part you know,’ said Klaus, his voice a little hoarse by then. He turned to Haruki and his eyes crinkled in the corners. ‘Since you saved the day and everything, you little stowaway.’

Haruki smiled softly at the stupidity and bravery of his younger self.

And then Klaus slowly told him about the eight years after that. Sometimes he would capture years in a few words, in terms of the steady drum beats of work on the farm. Other times, he would draw out certain weeks or days, painted in specific shades and textures. He talked and talked. He shared with Haruki the life he had shared with Taki.

His voice changed again when he spoke of Taki's illness. Haruki heard how much Klaus and hoped and despaired. And he learned that Klaus had awoken one dawn to find Taki had quietly left him.

Klaus told Haruki all of it, without holding back, in a way he couldn't have done with anyone else in the world, he realised. His throat closed with that same sweet, forlorn urgency that was carried in the first song he'd played. Like so many other things, sharing it with Haruki made it real. Something outside his own head.

Haruki listened until Klaus stopped talking. And he felt no jealousy. Only happiness that Klaus had known such love, even if it ended in such agony. And he had a better understanding, though only in snippets, of how much Taki hadn't been able to give him, and in all likelihood would never have been able to give him. It came with the surprising realisation that Haruki had inadvertently given him all of it. He felt, for his own, all of Klaus' pain and guilt and love. He felt moved and grateful and sorrowful all at once.

And so when Klaus started crying, for all the same reasons, Haruki held him, without saying a word, and with his whole heart.

‘Where the hell did you even come from, kid?’ Klaus muttered through his tears, moving Haruki to smile through his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone. If you’re reading these words, I just want to tell you you’re amazing for having followed the story this far. Maybe it’s because of what time it is right now or because I wrote that chapter in almost one sitting, but I’m feeling a bit emotional haha. Thank you for being there to read it, honestly. I can’t tell you how much it means.
> 
> Onto the notes in this chapter, a chapter which should be called "Captain Klaus' Mandolin" lol:
> 
> The music was inspired by Dean Martin, aka Dino Marzano haha, as well as the soundtrack of _Captain Corelli’s Mandolin_. (Btw, I highly recommend the book, and the music in the movie is quite moving.)
> 
> The first song Klaus plays, the instrumental about hope and sorrow that he used to play on the violin, is a piece called _The Mandolin_ from the film's soundtrack. In case you missed the asterisk link, here is the [YouTube version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOMmwyfPEio) straight from the film, and here is the much prettier [Spotify version](https://open.spotify.com/track/7A3ryZkjkW2GWxapFANF5f).
> 
> The second song he plays is Dean Martin’s _[Buona Sera](https://youtu.be/J9LK2UsLMS0),_ though Klaus' version is very different. Imagine it a lot slower, accompanied only by a mandolin (which comes in very faintly in Dean's version), and imagine Klaus’ huskier, deeper voice totally outdoing Dean himself, may the jazz gods forgive me for my heresy.
> 
> [Small update: I just found out Michael Buble does [his own sweet little version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoiRTPSuWlc). Again though, Klaus>Michael in terms of voice haha.]
> 
> And finally, re the asterisk at the end of Klaus and Haruki’s cheeky little conversation about cock size, I have the wonderful Moratorium to credit for giving me the idea. Thank you!
> 
> Really hope you enjoyed this chapter, everyone! Not long to go now before the end. Xx


	67. And Golden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This beautiful drawing of Taki's vase was done in January by one of my wonderful readers, Tenkamchi-sama, based on one of my old chapters.
> 
> (And here's [more](http://tenkamchi-sama.deviantart.com/gallery/44260736/Maiden-Rose) of her beautiful Maiden Rose art.)

Klaus’ birthday dawned on a summer morning that was just as bright and hot as those that had preceded it, both the recent ones they had spent at the cottage and those they had spent in another country – in the room with the wispy white curtain.

Haruki had awoken early to put the finishing touches on the gift.

Ever since he was a child, things had come together beneath his touch without his having to try too hard – broken radios, gramophones, telephones, televisions, even a faulty combine. And so this particular project didn’t pose a problem in a technical sense. But, as he carefully scratched away the last excess of varnish and glue, he felt his uncertainty growing. It had seemed like a good idea when he first had it. But now, a few days later, he struggled to imagine how Klaus would take it. Whether his reaction would reflect Haruki’s thoughts now; that he had overstepped.

But, with a sigh, he wrapped it carefully in tissue and then wrapping paper that he had found in a bottom drawer of the kitchen, most likely left there by Claudia. He walked down the short hallway into the bedroom, where Klaus was still asleep, naked and on his stomach, the sheets pooled in the small of his back. Strong morning sunlight poured through the window onto the bed.

It was the pleasant weight of Haruki straddling his lower back that first pulled Klaus out of sleep. As he rose further into consciousness, he also felt the weight of the sunlight on his back and shoulders and on the side of his face.

Haruki heard him take a deep breath in and he leaned forwards.

‘Happy birthday.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ Klaus mumbled into the pillow. He smiled beneath eyebrows that were pulled into a slight frown.

He then heard the rustling of paper and opened his eyes to see Haruki’s hand place a small wrapped gift on the pillow by his head.

He groaned. ‘Didn’t you already get me the mandolin?’

‘This didn’t cost me anything. It really isn't much.’

Klaus lifted his head a little to look over his shoulder. His hair still slightly dishevelled, Haruki wore only his pants, leaving his long, strong torso and lithe muscles bare in the sunlight.

‘Seeing you like that is enough of a birthday present.’

But the look of anticipation on Haruki’s face was enough for Klaus to hold back on that urge. He lifted up onto his elbows and reached for the gift, feeling a hard, delicate surface beneath the paper.

Haruki remained where he was as Klaus slowly unwrapped the vase. And his previous trepidation mounted when Klaus’ hands and expression seemed to freeze.

It was the rose etching Klaus saw first and he felt a sharp spike in his chest. And then the rest of the paper fell away to reveal the pale, slender vase – fluted mouth and swollen gourd and all. He held it in his hand for a few moments, seeing it shatter into several pieces on the kitchen floor three years ago.

The splinters were faint. They ran over the porcelain almost artfully. And Klaus saw the delicate care with which it had been put back together. Something else must have been used, some kind of ingenious spackling and varnish on top. The only conspicuous damage still left was on the lip, where a jagged piece was missing.

But it was exquisite; both the original and the way it had been repaired.

In Haruki, meanwhile, the regret and uncertainty he had felt earlier was beginning to crescendo.

‘I – I couldn’t find that little piece near the rim,’ he began hesitantly.

The silence confirmed that he had overstepped. After all, he knew, in part, the story behind the vase. It wasn’t his place to have tried to fix it. It wasn’t his gift to give.

He had also noticed, ever since they arrived back at the cottage, that Klaus had seemed slightly more preoccupied than he did when it was the two of them alone in a foreign land. It was a far cry from how distant Klaus had been over that past year, but it was enough for Haruki to worry. And worry that he had now, somehow, made it worse.

But beneath him, Klaus twisted his body to the side, took Haruki’s arm and pulled him forwards. He saw the look in Klaus’ eye before their mouths met. Butterflies crested in his stomach.

Klaus only broke away once – to carefully place the vase on the bedside table.

* * *

Even though they were there because Claudia had asked them to be, the Strausses, in the end, were unable to make the trip.

 _‘I’m so sorry!’_ Claudia lamented over the phone, her voice disproportionately distraught. _‘The flight school held Heinrich back to help with their summer festival, so he can’t make it. And Eva’s school just let out, but she’s already found part-time work and she says she might be called on, and on top of all that, Wilhelm came down with a bad fever.’_

‘Why don’t you just admit that none of you want to see me?’

_‘Oh, hush. Eva’s here, if you're able to stay on the phone. She wants to wish you a happy birthday.’_

‘Sure.’

There was a shuffling.

_‘Hello, Uncle Klaus.’_

Klaus’ heart gave a small thud. Despite the prim way she spoke, it occurred to him how much his niece’s voice sounded like his own mother’s. Almost eighteen now, he realised.

‘I heard you got early acceptance into the best university in the country. Sounds like you’re not working hard enough.’

_‘I’ll take that as congratulations.’_

Klaus grinned and leaned against the wall in the kitchen. ‘Found yourself a gentleman caller yet?’ he said, just to irritate her.

He didn’t expect the pause.

_‘Maybe.’_

‘That’s great!’ Klaus said, grin widening. He recalled an old conversation he’d had with her in that same kitchen. ‘Is he a real gentleman like you wanted or one of those loud, obnoxious types?’

Eva sighed in defeat. _‘He’s loud and obnoxious.’_

Klaus laughed heartily. ‘We’re not so bad. I’m glad you gave him a chance.’

 _‘Me too, most days,’_ she said, and Klaus heard a rare, affectionate note in her voice.

‘Your mother says you’ve found work.’

 _‘I’ve joined the_ Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine.’

‘The women’s rights movement?’

_‘Yes. I’m close with the woman in charge. She knows you, actually.’_

‘Me?’ said Klaus in surprise.

_‘Her name’s Greta von Braun. She was Greta Scholz before she got married.’_

Scholz.

‘Ah,’ Klaus realised uncomfortably. ‘My old girlfriend…’

Haruki, who had been fixing the gramophone on the kitchen table, glanced up with interest. Klaus winked.

 _‘I’ve heard a_ lot _of stories about you, Uncle,’_ Eva said, her tone shrewd.

‘None of them are true,’ Klaus tried weakly.

_‘I’m sure.’_

‘Well, between you and Greta, I’ll bet women will be running the world in no time.’

_‘We plan to. Oh, I have to go, Uncle, my ride’s here. Happy birthday!’_

‘Thanks, kiddo.’

Claudia came back on the line. _‘Heinrich asked me to pass along his wishes from school.’_

‘How’s little Wolverine doing?’

_‘Quite well, now that he’s finally settled. Did I tell you he nearly got expelled last year because he and a friend broke into one of the planes? They said they wanted to pretend they were flying. Wilhelm was furious.’_

Klaus chuckled. ‘It’s in our blood, Claud. You can’t fight it.’

Claudia beamed. She hadn’t heard her brother’s voice sound like that in years. Based on the quick letter he had sent from the east at the close of the war, which had arrived while she and the family were already making preparations to move back to their home in the city, all Claudia knew was that he would be stopping by the cottage to take the _Sagi_ for a spin.

Haruki realised he needed a spare part from the shed for the gramophone’s crank.

 _‘I’m sorry we couldn’t make it back there, Klaus,’_ said Claudia. _‘I hate that you’re alone on your birthday.’_

Face still etched in concentration, Haruki got up and headed for the back door. Klaus’ eyes followed him. In the centre of the table, a long-stemmed rose had been placed in a small porcelain vase. A vase that had only one missing piece.

‘I’m not,’ he assured her.

* * *

They had arrived at the cottage two days ago. It didn't take Haruki long to find the broken gramophone. Beside it, on the floor of the cabinet, Haruki also noticed the broken pieces of porcelain he had seen before, years ago. When he swung the doors open, he couldn’t help but feel as though he had opened a small door into the rage and grief in Klaus’ past.

He had asked about the gramophone, quietly, and Klaus’ gruff, edgy answer confirmed his suspicions.

‘I think I can fix it,’ Haruki had said, looking at the large pavillion and plateau, which were more or less intact.

‘You’ve pulled off bigger miracles,’ Klaus said with a small smile.

Haruki had almost worked up the nerve to ask about the rose-engraved pieces of porcelain next to the gramophone, but he didn’t want to spoil Klaus’ good mood. And the next day, Klaus inadvertently answered his question anyway, when he mentioned that it was high time he found a replacement vase for the centre of the kitchen table to replace the one Taki had made.

Though Klaus still very rarely mentioned Taki's name, Haruki was pleased to note that it sounded less and less heavy each time he did.

On their final morning in the dilapidated little room that overlooked the sea – the morning after Klaus cried in Haruki’s arms – Haruki finally asked. He asked why now. He asked what had changed during those few days between Klaus tearing out of the compound and finding Haruki again at the embassy. He felt it was the one missing piece that he needed and simply couldn’t do without.

Klaus had taken a moment before crouching by his suitcase. He carefully retrieved, from a flat, silk-lined inner pocket, a single sheet of paper, folded over once in the middle.

Haruki’s heart was already pounding by the time he finished reading the first few passages. And then, when he saw his own name, his breath left him.

Klaus watched tears spring to Haruki’s eyes as he kept reading, a hand holding the lower half of his face.

Haruki handed the letter back, feeling numb.

‘How did he…?’

Klaus smiled sadly, feeling a strange lump in his throat.

‘I have no idea. But thank God he knew more than I did.’

Haruki couldn’t muster a smile in response. His mind was racing back to those four days he had spent with Taki at the cottage.

_There is more in him than even he knows._

‘I wish I could… thank him… or…’ He clammed up quickly when he realised how inappropriate that sounded. How petty in the face of all that Taki had suffered.

But Klaus put his arms around him and kissed his tear-streaked cheek and then his lips.

‘I know what you mean.’

On the drive back to the _Sagi,_ after their fruitless search for the yellow flowers by the side of the road that had vanished, Haruki confessed in turn that it was Taki who had asked him to summon Klaus to the east after he was gone. And that, beyond a single letter, Haruki hadn’t been able to do it, knowing what Klaus himself was going through. Klaus’ eyebrows lifted slightly, eyes on the road, processing the new information.

Haruki was relieved to see the smile that spread slowly across his face.

‘So Ryoumei came instead, huh? Never would have picked that guy for a cupid.’

He gave the car a fond pat when they returned it, which was a little detail that stayed with Haruki for a long time.

* * *

And so on top of everything else, on top of the roiling waves of emotion that had filled his life over a few short weeks, another prominent one became known to Haruki. Gratitude to Taki. For the selflessness and the foresight that had allowed Klaus to come to him. So when Haruki made the decision to try to fix the vase, it felt as though he was doing it for Taki himself.

He picked moments when Klaus was in town getting supplies or tending to chores outside. And although he was fairly happy with his repair job, he lamented over the piece that was missing. He wondered about how he might fill it, but it was right on the edge; a place that he simply couldn’t fill. Oddly, his small failure in that regard bothered him. It was as though the jagged hole on the rim of the vase had left a similar shape inside him somewhere. Small and unobtrusive but present.

It still made him happy to see it take its place in the centre of the table, holding a single white rose from the garden, where he could imagine it had been for years and years, long before he had arrived on the scene.

They only spent four days in total at the cottage before flying back to the east, but several things happened in that time. Haruki was frequently in communication with Hasebe and Tansho, who were in the process of establishing a new headquarters for the Fifteenth in a new part of the country; closer to the north-eastern border near No Man’s Land. Though Haruki had been offered a promotion to Lieutenant General, he had denied it in order to remain Commander of the Fifteenth.

Klaus similarly had denied promotion, though for a different reason.

‘Major just doesn’t have the same ring to it,’ he mused lightly. ‘Captain sounds better on me.’

Haruki had also quietly asked for Tansho, in his role as Grand Chamberlain, to select a private property for him in time for his return to the east.

Klaus had been surprised when Haruki, from thousands of miles away, gave his approval for a piece of land that would be his new home. He glanced over his shoulder from where he stood at the stove.

‘Shouldn't you see it first?’

Haruki set down the phone and returned to the sink. ‘There wasn’t much choice. It was the only one that was suitable.’

Klaus' look was incredulous. ‘You’re an honorary prince of the court, title and all. The whole country’s practically been laid at your feet.’

Haruki rummaged around the cupboard beneath the sink, trying to find the measuring cup. After learning that Haruki had never learned to cook in his young illustrious career, Klaus had forced him into the kitchen to teach him a few recipes.

‘This was the only one that fit the… specifications.’

‘Specifications?’

Haruki almost blushed. ‘It’s in the Reizen province, close to the Reizen residence. So you can, you know, visit Midori and the family often…’

Klaus turned with wooden spoon in hand.

‘...And it’s big enough to have a small hangar… and a runway.’

‘For the _Sagi?’_

A pause. ‘Yes.’

Haruki straightened with the measuring cup but was having trouble meeting his eye. Klaus felt swept up again in a kind of love that continued to catch him off guard. Haruki fumbled over the rest of his words, aware of how presumptuous his plans were. The future was something Klaus had only made glib, brazen comments about in the past, rather than something they had discussed at length.

On top of that, he wasn't sure if this was to result in another withdrawal of the kind he had noticed since they had arrived back at the cottage. Another moment – sometimes a few seconds, sometimes longer – where Klaus would be lost to him.

So he was quick to add, ‘Not that I want you to feel like, you know, you have to live there with me or… or anything…’

Klaus grinned.

‘The alternative being that I leave my things here and commute to your place every day? That's cruel, Commander.’

Haruki looked up with a tentative smile. Somewhere in the back of his mind, making everything several degrees harder, were the biting words from long ago that he still couldn’t completely shake.

_You think I want this? To spend the rest of my life with a consolation prize?_

He knew now that Klaus had said it with only the misguided intention of hurting him. And yet it would linger for a long time. And it made Klaus’ bright, casual responses that day in that little kitchen seem that much less likely.

Happiness filled him slowly. Cautiously.

So he kept going, keeping Klaus in the corner of his eye.

‘I also picked it because there’s a smaller adjoining property available.’

‘What do you need that for?’

‘In case people... ask questions.’

Klaus scoffed. ‘Let them ask.’

But Haruki had given the go-ahead for Tansho to buy the adjoining property anyway. It was one thing for someone like Taki or Meiji or Midori. Knighthood completely rewrote social rules regarding cohabitation. For Haruki and Klaus, it wasn't the same, and he wanted to avoid the limelight in that respect. In fact, if it weren't for his duties as Commander, he would have been ready to give up the limelight completely. He glanced about the kitchen wistfully.

‘What about this place?’

Klaus tossed a spoonful of paprika into the pot on the stove. ‘Before Claudia moved in, I paid a few workers to take care of it every few weeks. Plus Verner helped out where he could. But if I'm heading east permanently, I'll just sell it. I know a few people in town who –'

‘No, don't,’ Haruki said at once. ‘I’ll cover it. You should get the workers to keep tending to it. So you can keep it in your name.’

Klaus looked at him in the silence that followed. ‘Kid, I can't ask you to do that.’

‘I can afford it now,’ Haruki said simply, without any affectation, as he carefully measured out a half-cup of water. ‘And I want to.’

Klaus stared and watched him pour the water in gradually, just as Klaus had shown him. He wondered at the symmetry of it. Taki had purchased the property for him a long time ago, under his own name, because, as property himself, Klaus couldn't hold title to anything. And now here Haruki was, going out of his way to make sure that Klaus would keep the cottage in his name. The home in which he had spent so much of his childhood. Both acts, in different ways, had amounted to the same thing.

And it almost made him feel overwhelmed again. He had felt it, on and off, ever since they returned from the land of mandolins. Ever since Klaus had broken down on their final night in Cena and found he had been left both weaker and stronger for it. And it had been exacerbated when they returned to a cottage that smelled of sandalwood and roses.

But he held himself together, both for Haruki’s sake and, he realised ironically, for the paella on the stove. He couldn’t zone out now, when he was keeping an eye on water being poured over the rice every few minutes.

‘Thanks, kid.’

In the few seconds before Klaus’ reply, Haruki had seen that Klaus had considered it again. Considered drawing away, or maybe even making an excuse and leaving. And he was relieved when he stayed put. And even more relieved at his answer.

They ate on the porch and watched the sun sink over the yellow fields, casting it bronze. The wind brushed its fingers through the stalks and there was a long silence.

Which was broken by the sudden and unexpected appearance of Ori, who sprang onto the porch railing from out of nowhere.

Haruki was startled at the strength of Klaus’ reaction to seeing the cat, and, judging by the wide eyes and immediate retreat, so was Ori. After a little coaxing with food and gentle sounds, Klaus discovered that the cat wasn’t, in fact, Ori, despite the similarities in their colour and markings. Over the next few minutes, the new Ori was joined by two more young cats, a ginger and another with the same markings, and Klaus was finally able to deduce where Ori had been each time she vanished.

‘The sly little minx,’ Klaus said, scratching the friendly ginger in the small of his back just before his tail. ‘I wonder how many other Ori’s she’s made. Where’s your mama gone?’ he added to the cat.

One of the Ori’s had taken a liking to Haruki and jumped nimbly onto his lap, from where she stared at his face with interrogative, unblinking eyes. He chuckled and petted her gently. Klaus watched.

‘Kaiser would have loved it here,’ Haruki said.

Klaus agreed in silence. He smiled as he imagined the dog bounding through the wheat stalks, sending Ori’s kin scrambling for cover. The silence that followed seemed to be dedicated to him. Him and Watanabe and a little corner of the compound that was no more, where maiden grass and small, earnest yellow flowers had once grown in abundance.

* * *

Haruki would wonder, in the coming months and years, whether he had a hand in it. Whether he could have said or done anything that might have made a difference. Or, even worse, whether anything he actually did, anything he actively let happen, could have been the butterfly beat of wings that resulted in everything else.

For instance, the first time he lost Klaus and spied him over the brick wall outside, sitting among the roses, he hesitated and wondered whether he should go and simply sit on the bench beside him. He could easily picture Klaus smiling and making room for him, swinging his heavy arm onto the seat behind Haruki, leaning in to kiss him. But Haruki had gathered that the garden meant something to him. From the rose engraving on the vase to the three-leafed rose of the division itself to the very faint scent of roses on the sheets, he knew it was something that was theirs and theirs alone. And so he had left Klaus to himself.

There had also been a few times when Haruki would catch Klaus with a faraway look in his eye, the kind that had always made Haruki feel like he had been left behind. More often than not, however, it would take only a blink or two and Klaus' gaze would soften and land on Haruki and Haruki would forget his momentary paranoia.

But there was also the moment he fixed the gramophone. The song he had played. The way Klaus had reacted in those few seconds.

And there was one final moment, after they left the cottage far behind, that Haruki would also think about for a long time. It happened when they were back in the east and Klaus finally decided it was time for him to visit the shrine where Taki had been laid to rest. Right before he had taken the long steps up into the green canopy of the shrine, he had glanced over his shoulder. And Haruki had almost asked if Klaus wanted him to come too. But, just like he had done when he saw Klaus in the rose garden, and each time Klaus’ heart and mind seemed like it had gone elsewhere, Haruki decided to leave him be. He smiled at the wink Klaus threw at him and watched him ascend the steps.

Each time, all he could do was wait for Klaus to come back to him.

* * *

For Klaus, the reasons behind his new periodic silences were hard to name. Ever since the night he had bared his soul, ever since that moment which had made him both stronger and weaker, things had taken a subtle turn. More little crevasses opened up before him.

One of the reasons behind his silences was Haruki himself. When he was with Haruki, he found he was staring at him almost urgently. As though time was running out for him to do so, even though he knew it was just a trick of fate, a voice telling him to soak up the kind of happiness that had eluded him all his life. In freer moments, he let himself speculate with an almost giddy happiness about their future. Whether their physical passion might dim or plateau or settle. Even that was something he was looking forward to, simply for that sated sense of having done it all and for so long that nothing else remained but wind-swept silences on a front porch.

But there was something more to it. Something that reminded him of his curse, in a way that was less pronounced now that the war was over but arose in smaller ways. He remembered how, on their final night in Cena, Haruki had held him and cried for him. The tears that were shed entirely selflessly, entirely on Klaus’ behalf. He thought of that, and the all the pain he had brought Haruki over the past year. He thought of the fact that the kid had thought of nothing but him since he was fourteen, had kept his gun, learned to fly, come back to command the division, walked down the war path. He was slowly and soberly coming to understand that it had all been for him.

As much as he had tried to move past it, and as much as their two weeks in Cena had helped keep it at bay, he wondered if he would ever be rid of his guilt and his conviction that Haruki’s love was nothing more than a gross mistake made by the gods that would soon be corrected. A life that was never his. Now more than ever he thought about, and even dreamed about, Haruki with a version of himself that wasn’t himself. A version that was younger and cleaner and whole. Someone Haruki truly deserved. Someone without a piece that would always be missing.

Klaus knew Haruki’s love for him was so great that he didn’t care about that missing piece. But he remembered how much he himself had been hurt over the piece of Taki that he could never reach. He remembered that lingering sense of inadequacy and frustration. At times, he wondered if Haruki was keeping all that inside him for Klaus' sake. More pain.

And the other reason for Klaus’ momentary silences was, as ever, Taki. Taki in a different sense, and in the same sense, since he had shared with Haruki the story of their lives together. It became real. Vivid. And it had emphasised everything; how long he had waited, how much he had loved, how much he had lost. A scent that lingered in the sheets, on the wind and in the garden.

The biggest hurdle of all came on his birthday itself, when Haruki finished fixing a gramophone that seemed beyond repair, and tested it with the only record that had survived Klaus’ onslaught years ago.

The one record whose first soft piano chords made Klaus’ breath catch in his throat, even when he was on the other side of the house. He came into the living room to see Haruki’s wide smile vanish, and he knew it was probably because of the look on his face.

 _Take my hand._ _  
_ _Take my whole life, too._

It all made him wonder whether this was, really, the way his life was always destined to end. Whether an unassuming encounter on the floor of the old man’s shop, a cadet who rode with him on the back of his bike, had always been written into the saga of his life for this reason.

_Love that feels written by the hand of fate – it is quite a thing. In fact, the only thing that might rival it is a love that has lived earnestly and silently for a decade._

A different colour. A different flower, a different scent. That was all it was. A fate he had written for himself. And a fate Taki had written for him, in the letter that Klaus still kept near him whenever he could.

‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ Haruki said, taken aback. He didn’t know what he had done, but he had a strong feeling that the drawn look on Klaus’ face had something to do with the record, which was still playing. His hand moved to the needle.

‘No,’ Klaus said, grateful that words had come to his aid before he had decided what to say. What to feel. ‘It’s alright. Let it play.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine.’

Heidi Reinhart’s soft voice filled the room once more, carrying feelings from another time that had been buried beneath darker ones. Feelings that were sweet and simple and aching.

He tried to settle his features into a smile. ‘The gramophone lives. You’re a miracle worker, kid.’

And so, like that, in moments that sometimes only took him seconds and other times took him longer, Klaus would slowly bring himself back to Haruki. Those moments of doubt were nothing compared to the happiness Haruki brought him. It was the chipped red paint of a charming rental that had taken them to Cena and back. It was the broken rim of a vase that had been fixed. And it only took Haruki’s hand slipping into his, or being reflected in soulful brown eyes that made him feel like he could do anything, or coming up behind Haruki where he stood at the table clearing up the tools with which he had fixed the gramophone and wrapping his arms around him, breathing him in, feeling the warmth of Haruki's body transfer to him, watching his hand place the screwdriver on the table and move to Klaus’ forearm, his bicep, the side of his face – moments like those were all it took for Klaus to sink back into happiness like he was sinking into a warm bath. Like he was real and present and, almost, whole.

He could feel it. That he had come to rest, finally. He had spent his life searching, in much the same way Beatrice von Wolfstadt had been searching, and something Claudia had seen in them both. He had found his destiny in Taki. And he had found his happiness in Haruki. And if doubts lingered, he knew it only owed to the fact that he didn't know those two things could be separate.

He hoped those doubts would fade. Just as he hoped and despaired over the idea that his memory of the rose's scent would fade.

* * *

There had been no hint that the retreat of the Eurotean forces had resulted in hostility of any kind. They heard from Shoda’s people that the last of the troops were just about to cross through No Man’s Land straight into Eurote. And so the reason for their return to the east was far more light-hearted than either of them expected. It was to see Rudi becoming knighted by the hand of young Midori, who had turned sixteen two days after Klaus turned thirty-seven.

Klaus was at the controls of the _Sagi_ when they touched down in the east, on the private runway of the newly purchased Yamamoto residence, through which, to their surprise, a small river ran. There were trees shielding the large single-storey home from view, and small courtyards bordered by white lattice fences. The garage revealed a brand-new car though not Klaus’ bike, which Tansho apologetically informed them had been taken to the new headquarters of the Fifteenth along with the other military vehicles.

‘If that’s the only mistake he made, he did a damn good job,’ Klaus remarked when they gave the place a once over. ‘I should apologise for yelling at him through the door in the embassy.’

Haruki, meanwhile, was overwhelmed by the size of the house and property. As soon as he voiced his thought that he would need to hire live-in servants and groundskeepers to help run it, Klaus grabbed him unexpectedly. They were in one of the lattice-fenced courtyards housing a small patch of bamboo and a tiny green pond, which offered reflections only through gaps in the algae.

‘No, no, no,’ Klaus warned. ‘I’ll cook and mow and plant and friggin’ mulch, whatever the hell is needed. I’ll be your goddamn errand boy. No one else. No more door-knock interruptions for as long as I live.’

When Haruki laughed, Klaus kissed him hard, holding onto the lattices for support. A few minutes later, they were inside the huge, empty house, just barely past the genkan, and Haruki pulled him to the tatami-covered floor, eliciting a warm, surprised chuckle from Klaus. The front door that overlooked the gentle dip down to the front gate was left wide open, with no one to hear them but the birds that had claimed that territory long ago.

Air escaping his mouth in small puffs, Haruki bit and pulled at Klaus’ lips as Klaus’ hand moved past his beltline and slipped beneath his trouser front, moving flat over his balls and cock, trapping them in the heat from his palm, before moving further south. Klaus watched Haruki gradually losing the ability to focus on Klaus’ lips as his body made room for him yet again; head falling back, neck arching, voice devolving into moans. Afterwards, they lay where they had landed, Klaus’ feet dangling over the edge of the genkan, and Haruki's fingertips lightly trailing patterns over his shoulders and arms, figure-eights and waves and swirls that reminded Klaus of the way his mother had marked a waterfall on a map she had once made.

He thought guiltily of the secret clearing back in the west. The small creek jumping from mossy stone to stone. He had considered showing it to Haruki while they were there and only changed his mind at the last minute. He tried not to overthink that particular decision. It didn't seem important anyway, when he lay with Haruki like that at the threshold of a large house that had only themselves and tatami mats.

It was with the large empty house and its river and lattices in mind – as well as their impending hours in the sky, on a dotted path that would cover the rest of the world – that they made the short trip to the Reizen residence to watch Rudi make his lifelong pledge to Midori.

None of them knew that a thousand miles away, Minister Andrea Rossi was seething. His anger hadn’t yet disturbed the crystal clarity and poised beauty of the Reizen residence; its yellow gravel paths and trees, sparkling lake and the wide pier.

That was when Haruki finally realised why he had never been able to bring up the question of knighthood with Klaus. He wondered on and off about his bones-deep reluctance and had almost settled on the idea that it was because he couldn’t fathom the thought of someone who had once been like a god to him becoming reduced to nothing more than his property.

But it was something even deeper than that, which he only understood then. What he was watching now, the way that Rudi looked at Midori as he knelt before her, wasn’t something that could happen with another in one lifetime.

Midori’s dainty headdress was beautiful, with a material like crepe paper stretching between pins into an intricate shape that was either a flower or a butterfly. She wore robes of emerald green in homage to her name. And Klaus’ felt the smallest flare in his gut when he recognised that Rudi’s robes were the same sky-blue shade of the robes that he himself wore on that very same pier. He wondered what had become of them.

After they spoke to both princess and her knight, and after Midori had the chance to thank the young commander she had wanted to meet months ago, Klaus walked with Haruki slowly across the length of the Reizen residence. They even passed a bench where, though neither of them remembered, they had once sat together as captain and cadet, Klaus wearing the sky-blue robes he had just been thinking of, and Haruki struggling to come to terms with his feelings for the one who sat beside him.

They reached the shrine where Haruki had hesitated, and where Klaus had winked over his shoulder before ascending the steps.

Haruki remained at the base of the steps, staring at a guardian spirit stone carved in the shape of a wolf, where Douman Tachibana had once waited anxiously before Taki Reizen gave him his blessing for his sister’s hand. Haruki smiled and wondered how much that little statue had seen over the centuries. He then thought of gramophones and records, and Klaus sitting alone in a rose garden.

He was thinking of them earlier that day, Klaus’ hand in the latticework of the fence, his lips on Haruki’s, when Klaus returned. Haruki tried to read the look in his eye.

That was when the siren rang. Distant and loud and terrible, city-wide, generating a slow, awful panic in all those who heard it. And it sliced that moment, that day, clean in two.

* * *

The dry tinder was already there, in the bristling of two armies as one was forced to trudge back across the thousands of miles home under the watchful eye of the other.

And the spark came in the form of a single Eurotean soldier, who had been driven to his wit’s end by all the marching, by the overwhelming sense of defeat and, beneath it all, a fierce sense of betrayal that the very same armies shepherding them across No Man’s Land was the army they were fighting alongside only weeks ago.

When his regiment was forced through a checkpoint near the eastern border and forced to give up all of their arms, in contravention of the conditions of retreat, this particular soldier had had enough. He refused.

And he was shot.

And his battalion, exhausted and enraged, took up their weapons on his behalf.

In headquarters, General Shoda was told of the outbreak in hostilities. And he ordered the entire battalion to be made an example of. They were rounded up and killed.

Word spread among the retreating Euroteans. The battalion was part of a regiment which swarmed on the eastern soldiers, pulling in more men from that infantry division like a thread unravelling an entire tapestry. Fighting broke out in No Man’s Land near the eastern border, and the eastern soldiers were surprised enough that the Euroteans were able to push them back towards their own border.

Meiji had given Shoda specific instructions that no Eurotean soldier who was retreating peacefully should be harmed. Though plenty had been taken as POWs by the Western Alliance on the Western Front, there were simply too many troops for either east or west to take any more Euroteans prisoner. A peaceful retreat seemed like the quickest route to peace. Only nuclear weapons were to be interred during the retreat.

The only point that weighed on Meiji’s mind was the fact that Minister Andrea Rossi had refused to speak to him personally, and that the majority of tense negotiations had been left to the Ministers for Defence in both nations. Meiji knew Rossi was dangerous and that nothing that Tachibana had done, either during that war or before it, could have happened without Eurote’s backing.

Though Meiji had an inkling of Shoda’s ruthlessness, Rossi’s vengefulness and the dire circumstances surrounding the retreat, he had no way of knowing how all of those things would spiral during that one lethal afternoon.

* * *

And Rossi. Rossi was in his private bunker as the revolution swept over his government, his city, his country, like a tidal wave – his own empire crumbling. With him was his wife, who was thin and pale and whose hair was perfect as usual, even in death, even when the cyanide capsule had done its part. Their dogs also lay dead nearby, loyal to the end when they had been used to test the efficacy of the capsules.

He felt the round, cold weight on his back tooth. He sweated. He waited for something, though he didn’t know what. He wasn’t a coward, not like Mussolin. So he didn’t think it owed to a lack of will.

And when the phone rang, he knew it was whatever was waiting on the other end. He was waiting to hear something. To give one final order.

He heard of the outbreak of fighting in No Man’s Land near the eastern border. He heard that the last of their men were putting up a fight. He knew it was futile. And yet the anger raged in him afresh. The deepest wound came not from the revolution above but from the fact that his once-proud army was being forced to slink home because the east had abandoned them. Turned their guns on them.

There was still one weapon Eurote hadn’t yet unleashed. One which that bastard Shoda hadn’t been able to inter and decommission during the retreat. One that could be turned around and sent back across No Man’s Land, across the land that the Easterners were too proud and foolish to cross. They could roll right to the border itself and take it down.

He gave orders to his men, men he knew had been conditioned so perfectly, like Major General Kolya Volkov had once been, that they would follow the sound of his voice even if it came from the afterlife.

He told them to take down the Eastern Country. As much of it as they could. For Eurote and what remained of her glory.

It didn’t matter that it would happen after Rossi was already gone. His legacy would be written into the demise of the east.

And then, after several moments of staring into the nothingness of his bunker, he bit down on the cyanide capsule at the same moment that he cocked his pistol. He would make it hard for them to figure out which of them finished him off.

* * *

Both Klaus and Haruki felt how quickly that familiar energy filled their body. There was almost no room for despair or disappointment or frustration. They would always feel, just like Klaus and Taki had always felt, that any peace they were given was nothing more than a reprieve, and that before long the siren call of war would beckon them again.

Though how literally it happened did manage to alarm them both. They immediately returned to the pier where the small crowd that had gathered were already dispersing. Midori found them, eyes wide. The siren was loud and everywhere.

‘Klaus-chan, what’s happening?’

‘I don’t know yet. But it’ll be fine.’ He looked at Rudi, who was never far from her side. ‘Get everyone into the bunkers. Yura, Soseki, everyone. And stay there.’

‘Shouldn’t we evacuate?’

‘No time, not if the siren’s being sounded.’ Klaus stared at the people who were fleeing for their cars and wondered, suddenly, how many would make it. ‘Go, now. Keep your radios on and don’t come out until you hear it’s safe.’

Rudi gave a tense nod. Midori stared at Klaus for a moment and squeezed his hand before she led Rudi whisk her away.

Klaus and Haruki glanced at one another before heading straight for their car, where Haruki immediately switched on the wireless radio. He spoke to headquarters and, after listening for a few seconds, Klaus sped them in the direction where the siren sounded.

From early reports, it sounded to Klaus that things had indeed gone belly-up in No Man’s Land.

‘Can’t have everything work out, can we?’ Klaus said with a grin, even as his heart pounded over the siren. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

He said it just to see Haruki smile in exasperation.

* * *

An old fort that hadn’t been used since the first war against Eurote was in the process of being refurbished as the new headquarters of the Fifteenth Armoured Division. It took a little under half an hour for Klaus to bring them there.

In that time, they had felt the tremor of the impact.

Klaus had even stopped the car in the middle of the road as vehicles streamed in the opposite direction. He had even reached over and gripped the side of Haruki’s neck and leaned in. Haruki had even squeezed his eyes shut, his hand clenching Klaus’ jacket.

But the tremor was far from them, and as the seconds lengthened, it became clear that a second missile wasn’t to follow. And so, Klaus, breathing a little raggedly, eyes on the sky through the windshield, had swiftly kissed Haruki on the temple and floored the accelerator once more.

As headquarters hoped, the medium-range missile had landed shy of the nation’s border. The shockwaves had still been felt by those on the outer edges of the Eastern Country. Trees and houses fell like cards in a gust of wind. But the missile itself had landed on No Man’s Land, almost fifty kilometres shy of the border itself.

The compound was gearing up to move out. And Haruki knew each man, while rushing to his post, was wondering the same thing. Who, and why.

Hasebe and Tansho seemed immensely relieved to see him. And he answered both of Haruki’s questions before he had asked.

‘A Eurotean medium-range high-yield launcher turned back as it was retreating across No Man’s Land. We think they didn’t come into close enough range to get the missile past our border.’

‘How did we know in time to sound the siren?’

‘A western patrol plane happened to spy the launcher rolling into place and aiming. But it doesn't have any weapons capability and couldn’t subdue it.’

‘Have any other Eurotean forces turned hostile?’

‘One of the infantry divisions has opened fire on our soldiers. They’ve pushed us almost to the border. General Shoda’s asked for back-up from all nearby bases.’

‘Are our men in the fallout radius?’

‘I’m not sure, sir. We think so.’

Haruki processed as quickly as he could, even as he pulled on the jade jacket that Tansho handed him. That answered the question of who. And the why, he surmised, owed to what he and Meiji had been wary about. Tensions during the withdrawal. A wounded Eurote lashing out with a fatal passing shot.

‘Get Onokami and all the tank units ready. Tell the tank crews they are not to open the hatch of their tanks under any circumstances. No infantry is to be sent out, tank units only.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Tansho as he hurried away, dodging running soldiers, in order to relay the orders. Meanwhile, a breathless lieutenant just reached Hasebe with a new report that they had received from headquarters. And the siren continued to wail.

‘You’ll make an exception for me, I hope,’ said Klaus airily.

Haruki turned to him. ‘No,’ he said firmly, even though he knew Klaus was joking. ‘I can’t risk you going near the fallout. Stay behind.’

Klaus let out a frustrated exhale. ‘My least favourite order.’

He felt the adrenaline in his fingertips again. The adrenaline and a simmering anger brought about the look of fear on Midori’s face. The way his heartbeat had drowned out everything else when he reached for Haruki in the car. The peace that had splintered under the siren call.

Haruki looked at him sympathetically just as they reached Onokami, where Asuza, Moriya and Date stood and saluted, along with a new second-gunner who had replaced Kolya. That was when Hasebe turned to him, eyes scanning the latest report.

‘The western patrol plane’s latest report is that the launcher is still on course, heading towards us.’

‘But they’ve already fired,’ Haruki said, thinking of their own medium-range mobile launchers and their capacity for a single missile.

‘The report suggests a few low-range, low-yield nukes. But it’s a single-pilot patrol. He can’t tell for sure.’ Hasebe glanced at the launcher’s location. ‘Even if they have secondary low-yield nukes left, they’re still too far away to make any impact on our men or the border.’

Haruki didn’t like not knowing for sure. ‘Can we send in the air force to report on whether they’re still capable of striking?’

Hasebe faltered. A fragment of his former self came to the fore. ‘Our commanders are reluctant send their men so deep into No Man’s Land. Both air force and army. Sir.’

Haruki sighed and blinked hard in frustration. He glanced at the crew of Onokami, each of whom had already been there once before, Azusa who had done so facing the possibility that he would never board any of the Rosen Maiden tanks again, and none of whom held any more reservations about that accursed land. But they were needed on the front lines to hold back the Euroteans.

‘I’ll head out to the launcher by bike,’ Klaus said, as though hearing his thoughts. ‘I’ll skirt the fallout radius and report back about what they’re carrying and what they’re doing.’

Hasebe seemed to be on board with the idea. Haruki looked at Klaus while absently giving a nod for the Onokami crew to board.

‘You’ll be sure to avoid the blast radius?’ he said, his voice filled with doubt.

‘By miles,’ Klaus said at once.

‘It’ll take you an hour or more to get anywhere within sight of the launcher’

‘That’s nothing.’

‘Okay,’ Haruki said finally, his voice a fraction stronger. ‘Strictly recon, though, okay?’

‘Got it,’ Klaus said, relieved to be doing something useful.

Haruki’s uncertainty was now spread evenly between sending Klaus out into No Man’s Land and the men of the Fifteenth in their ordered chaos, about to ride into the fray. Klaus watched him hesitate before he turned to climb Onokami’s track.

‘Don’t worry about it, Commander. We knew something like this might happen. It’s just an angry bird scratching without talons. We’ll shoot her down in no time, then we can hop back in the _Sagi._  Okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Haruki said.

He knew Klaus was right. The nuke was a close call, but the gods had spared them, and now there was only a lone launcher and a desperate division. Nothing like the odds they faced during the civil war. They would come out of it in a few hours.

One final test, one of a string of tests and hurdles and ‘final missions’ that Klaus always thought would be the last one, before they could return to the home Haruki had chosen with Klaus in mind. It was yet another final mission, even though Klaus knew by then, better than anyone, that only the dead see the end of war. But if it was for Haruki, for Haruki's sake, he would tackle each final mission as it came.

Just as Haruki turned to climb into Onokami, Klaus took his arm. He then slid his hold to Haruki’s hand and brought it to his lips.

A quiet moment in the chaos of the square.

_Come, release me into the field then, my Master. The call of your voice is my everything._

He remembered, as though it had happened the day before, how Taki had looked at him when he knelt.

Now, with his mouth lingering on Haruki’s hand after he kissed it, he smiled at the new young commander’s reaction.

‘I wonder if there’ll ever be a day when I do that and you don’t blush.’

Haruki smiled weakly and thought to himself that there probably wouldn’t. When Klaus released his hand, Haruki looked at him with a look that was an appeal.

‘Scout and report and come back, okay? We have Western Alliance air defence en route to take them out if need be.’

‘I'm going up against a missile launcher on a motorbike. What else am I going to do?’

His grin was wide and his eyes twinkled at his master’s anxiety on his behalf.

‘Stay on the air,’ Haruki said finally.

‘I will.’

* * *

It was a bright, beautiful day for yet another final mssion. He patched through to Haruki by the time his bike roared past the border into No Man’s Land. Klaus smiled when he reflected on the fact that the west was sending forces to hold back the last of the Euroteans.

‘Don’t know why it took us this long to figure out that east and west should band together to take down the fuckers in Eurote,’ he said. ‘Seems obvious now, doesn’t it? We’d have ended the war decades ago.’

He thought he heard a quiet chuckle over the crackle of the airwaves.

The last time Klaus had ridden into No Man's Land, it had been in the thick of winter. Summer didn’t change its barrenness. Rather, it imbued the dry ground and its spare shrubs with a kind of oppressiveness. Heaviness.

Onokami, meanwhile, had joined the fighting a few klicks outside the border where Haruki saw that Klaus’ cavalier assessment of Eurote’s last stand was spot on. It was a tired infantry division, driven only by bruised pride and the last, desperate orders of a dictator whom they had been conditioned to follow without question, both as soldiers and as Euroteans.

The terrain near the border was bare and flat with the emptiness of No Man’s Land stretching off behind them. There were almost no trees or any other areas for the Euroteans to take cover. And further into No Man’s Land, Haruki saw the edges of the impact crater, one that was many times the size of the one that had taken the Fifteenth. His pulse surged as he peered through the periscope. It would have laid waste to an entire area of the Reizen province if the launcher had been any closer.

Haruki ordered the infantry that had already engaged to fall back, giving the tanks enough space for warning blasts to be fired at the ground in front of the Euroteans’ front lines. They fell back bit by bit as the tanks rolled ahead. So scrambled were the Euroteans that they didn’t have nearly enough anti-tank weaponry, and the few launchers were taken out by Onokami within minutes.

‘Klaus? Are you there?’

Transmission through No Man’s Land had always been patchy, even with the best long-range wireless radios. Since Klaus’ dry political observation half an hour ago, Haruki had only heard snippets of his voice.

Klaus meanwhile, heard the same from his commander. He imagined each small burst of Haruki’s voice was like a lit beacon he was leaving behind him, to follow home once he was done. He occasionally consulted the map, with the co-ordinates given to him by the western patrol plane, which was still circling nearby.

As he flew over the rocky terrain, sometimes using small inclines to soar over shallow valleys, he realised with some amusement that No Man’s Land was probably his favourite place to ride. The land was bare and flat enough that, at times, he felt as though his bike was still and the landscape was being pulled behind him like a large tapestry.

‘Not sure if you’re reading me, kid,’ he said into the wireless, which was mostly static. ‘But I’m almost there. Another few clicks.’

When the map told him he was within sight of where the launcher was last seen, he kept his eyes peeled. At length, he spotted the circling patrol plane in the air. And before him, the landscape changed for the first time. A valley, perhaps a canyon, stretched before him, extending left and right as far as he could see. On the map, it had been marked as the Okaminoshi Pass. He spied the land rising a little towards his right, at the top of which was a tree that seemed to overlook the valley.

He noticed the tree out of the corner of his eye and almost did a double-take. For a second, he was sure he had seen long violet arms and flowers fluttering in the breeze. But when he looked properly, it was a withered skeleton, and more morose than any other tree Klaus had seen, with thin, meandering branches that spread outwards and down rather than up, in a way that said it might have been a wisteria tree long ago.

He turned his bike and headed up the short incline towards the tree. He stopped the bike by its trunk and the entirety of No Man’s Land, right until the border of Eurote, was suddenly open to him.

And he saw it.

Across the valley which he could now see as a canyon, approaching slowly on the other side, was a launcher of a size he had never seen before. Larger than three tanks put together, pointed aggressively at the helm, half a dozen massive tyres on either side bearing a weight that turned Klaus’ stomach cold whe he honed in with his binoculars.

He counted eight individual launchers angled on its back, with only one of them empty. Each of them large enough to be medium-range at the very least.

‘Shit.’

It curled into him then. A strange dark shadow that was almost familiar. Like something that had been waiting behind a closed door, an old door, for him to open it.

He reached for the wireless again.

It couldn't be. Surely Rossi wasn’t as spiteful as all that, for a parting shot to be so vile. Surely the cold-eyed, lion-like Andrea Rossi whose tenure had quietly suppressed the Euroteans for a decade in the background, wasn’t capable of such mindless, overt destruction.

Haruki had the same thought when Klaus’ voice, suddenly clear, grimly reported what he saw. But they both knew they were wrong.

By then, the Fifteenth had beaten down the Eurotean attack near the border. The Euroteans looked like they were ready to lay down their weapons. Haruki issued orders where he could, his mind on the launcher and the arrows it could sling.

‘Is it still on the other side of the Okaminoshi Pass?’

‘Yes,’ Klaus said.

The transmission cleared each time one of them spoke. It even gave Klaus the strange feeling like the dead wisteria tree beside him was an antenna of some sort.

‘Is the Okaminoshi Bridge still intact?’

Klaus glanced down to his left. It seemed the launcher was heading slowly towards a single, long stone bridge that would bring it over the pass. From that distance, it seemed thin and ancient. He had the fleeting hope that perhaps it would buckle under the launcher’s weight.

‘Looks like it,’ he replied.

Haruki’s mind raced. ‘It’s still too far, even for the medium-range missiles. They’ve probably figured that out since the first missile they launched. They have to get closer before they hit us.’

‘How much closer?’

‘I’m not… I’m not sure.’

Haruki told Azusa to relay information to headquarters immediately and to ask for fighter jets to be sent out to the Okaminoshi Pass immediately.

Klaus grit his teeth, already suspecting that the order would be met with hesitation for long, precious minutes, at the end of which there was a chance that nothing would be done.

‘How long before the Western Alliance air force gets here?’

‘Another hour or so,’ Haruki estimated. ‘That’ll – that’ll be enough time. They’ll get there before the launcher gets within range.’

‘What if they don’t?’ Klaus asked, his voice suddenly strained.

‘They will,’ Haruki said, his voice steeped in a kind of certainty that came from desperate hope.

And so Klaus had to picture it alone. The launcher is within range long before the fighter jets arrive. The remaining seven missiles are set loose as Rossi watches from behind tired, vengeful eyes. It takes out entire cities, entire chunks of the Reizen residence. Rudi and Midori and the rest of Reizen bloodline are confined to a life in the bunkers until the fallout drops to safe numbers. The Reizen residence is gone, wisteria tree and all.

The property Haruki had bought. The one he had chosen with Klaus in mind.

‘A lot of the cities have already been evacuated,’ Haruki said, his mouth dry. This was worse, infinitely worse, than the impasse he had been faced with when Tachibana turned his weapons on the Fifteenth. ‘Gridlock traffic on the edges of the province might catch some of the fallout… but the Western Alliance has sent warnings to Rossi about a counter-attack using their long-range missiles. They – they won’t fire.’

Klaus’ jaw was still clenched hard. He knew that Rossi was acting like a man with nothing to lose. Below him, across the pass, the dark launcher with its dark cargo just reached the bridge.

‘And the planes will be there in time anyway,’ Haruki went on, realising with a sinking feeling that it was out of their hands. ‘Klaus, you should get out of there.’

But Klaus was silent.

On top of all that, there was Haruki himself. Only a few clicks away from the border, tied by duty to the front lines. There was no telling whether he could get out or get to a bunker in time. Whether even the hide of Onokami would protect him from the fate that had taken Taki.

Almost unconsciously, Klaus swung the bike around slightly to the left, pivoting on a foot.

‘Klaus?’

Everything fell away and went silent.

And he caught the faintest trace of a scent in that moment, in that place that was hundreds of miles from where the nearest flower grew.

 _What now?_ he asked, not for the first time. _What should I do?_

The answer came to him so much a startling epiphany so much as it was a gentle sigh. The feeling of fingers trailing softly through his hair. It was the same breeze that had folded Haruki’s letter against his hand as he sat, half-drunk, in the rose garden a year ago. The same voice that made the decision.

_It’s your call._

His jaw unclenched. He closed his eyes. A sudden, peaceful silence took him.

And the dead tree beside him was lush with flowers once more. He listened to them rustle with his eyes still closed, knowing the branches would be bare when he opened them again.

He couldn’t tell whether it was his own voice or someone else’s. A decision both written by his own hand, and the hand of another.

And though he didn't know it, in Taki's vision, the fire had consumed them both.

* * *

'Haruki.'

Haruki heard it immediately. A tone in Klaus' voice that had never been there before.

'Reading you,' he said, holding the headphone closer to his ear.

‘Get word to the plane in the sky to get far away, as fast as he can.’

A small frown creased Haruki's brow. For no reason he felt a prickling sensation through his skin. Dread like a drop of tar in the pit of his stomach.

'What do you mean? Why?’

But Klaus didn’t reply for several minutes.

In that time, Haruki relayed the message to headquarters, which in turn carried the order to the western patrol plane. The pilot sent back a reply before he turned tail and left.

'Sir...' Azusa interrupted, wondering if he was hearing correctly. 'The captain – he's heading straight for the Okaminoshi Bridge, sir.’

Haruki glanced down at Azusa.

In that moment, black talons clutched his heart, and refused to leave him for years and years.

* * *

Air whipped by Klaus' goggles and pulled at his jacket. His hair captured the brightness of the summer sun. The drone of the bike thrummed through his body. A sound and a feeling he knew like it was burned into his soul.

He couldn’t tell whether it was the bike or gravity doing most of the riding as he sped down towards the edge of the pass. The bare arms of the tree grew smaller in his side-view mirror until it was lost from view.

The stone bridge loomed, around two to three klicks in length, with side railings so worn down by time and the elements that they seemed almost flush with the bridge itself. The launcher was already a quarter of the way across.

Plenty of time, Klaus thought, with a wry smile. A smile that suddenly irritated the scar on his left cheek, which hadn’t hurt in ten years.

For several minutes, he didn’t think. He didn’t let himself think. He only felt; the air around his goggles, cleaving at him, trying to pull him back. He felt that voice that told him it was his call, and his sense that he had no choice.

But as he got closer to the bridge, he let the thoughts peter in slowly.

He wondered if he had, in fact, had a hand in writing his own fate. Perhaps, in the end, he'd had no say in either his birth or his life or his death. Or perhaps, as a dark-skinned girl in a bar in Braxton once said, he at the very least had control over his own death. It only seemed fair.

And surely he had had a hand somewhere in writing his life too, he mused calmly, even as his heart pounded, as the barren colours of crags and rock faces fled by. Surely he had finally mastered his own fate, at least once before this as well, when he went to Haruki. When he found a kind of happiness he didn't think he deserved, fleeting though it was. Surely that was him and not the gods. Surely Haruki was the one thing he had done right.

Those were the kinds of thoughts that rushed to the forefront of his mind, thoughts that, before then, had simmered and fluctuated in the backdrop, nothing more than spectres, but which were now singularly important.

Haruki was the one thing he had done right.

On cue, his voice came through the speakers. A voice that had once pulled him from the depths.

'Klaus?’

He took a few long seconds before he replied.

'I'm here.'

'What are you doing?'

The very slight quiver in his voice. The pause during which there was only the roar of the bike.

'I love you, kid.’

Fear filled Haruki’s body. Azusa heard Klaus’ words too, as did every wireless operator in each of the tanks.

‘Klaus –'

‘You saved me, you know. More than once. I was never able to thank you for it properly though, huh? Maybe now I can.’

The talon clutch worsened. Haruki struggled to breathe. Onokami turned away from the combat on the ground and pointed into the heart of No Man’s Land.

‘No. No, you can’t! You won’t be able to make it out.’

The pause scared him more than anything Klaus said.

‘No! Klaus, don’t!’ And tears sprang hotly when the impossible thought continued to submerge him. ‘No, you'll – there has to be another way to –’

‘The others won’t make it in time.’

Klaus’ voice, even when raised over the roar, seemed almost calm. It made Haruki’s heart throw itself against ribs.

‘They’ve deployed the fighter jets from Shikoku,’ he said, reeling, scrambling for something, anything. ‘They’ll be there in a few minutes. Klaus, please turn back.’

Azusa looked at him in surprise. There was another pause before Klaus spoke again.

‘I think that’s the first time you’ve ever lied to me.’

Tears spilled freely down Haruki’s face. And he somehow managed to keep his voice strong.

‘Klaus, come back, right now. That’s an order.’

‘Not this time, kid,’ Klaus said, again almost gently.

And in fact, Klaus wondered.

He knew there was the smallest chance that he and Haruki would make it through unscathed yet again. But the thought tired him, suddenly. He remembered that only the dead see the end of war. He could choose life, he could choose Haruki and all the battles yet to come, if either of them even survived. Or he could do one thing that would ensure that Haruki survived, and ensure that he, Klaus, would return to his master. A single act, decided out of nowhere, in response to an enemy that had crouched in the shadows of his life and emerged from nothing, and which rounded off thirty-seven years.

The choice, the entire situation, had come to him as abruptly as the day he slipped on the roof of the cottage. He knew he could have pulled himself up. But instead, he chose to let go.

And his heart ached and soared and plummeted and soared again when he remembered the only time that Taki had ever come to him, alive, in his dreams. He had skidded to a halt in front of Taki and sobbed into his lap and Taki had quietly told him that he would be waiting on the other side.

* * *

Haruki didn’t even hear himself give Onokami the order to move out. He only peripherally was aware of the fact that the Euroteans had surrendered. The tank thundered past them, straight into No Man’s Land. He only realised he must have given the order to all other tanks when he saw them catch up with Onokami, some of the newer ones even overtaking them.

Seeing their commander head into that cursed land was all the other tank crews had to see before they followed. They didn’t know that within Onokami, Haruki was threatening to break apart.

Surely not. Surely not now, like this. Not after everything they had been through to get there. It was unthinkable. It didn’t make sense. A bird without talons, a quick shot and they would be done, Klaus had said so himself. Only that morning, they were lying on tatami mats on the edge of the genkan. A quick shot, and they would be back in the _Sagi_ again.

‘Klaus! Klaus, where are you? Please come in! _Please!’_

The thought of how much he would be hurting Haruki was peripheral to the clarity. The epiphany. The wolf that reared one final time. And in fact, the only time he let his mind wander down that path, it rushed quickly to the end, where he saw Haruki with a younger, cleaner version of him. Someone without scars, without demons, without a part of his heart always lingering in the past. Someone Haruki truly deserved.  
  
He heard the bike sigh with relief when he reached the bridge and the rocky ground turned into the smooth whisper of the stone bridge. Even from that distance, the missile launcher loomed hugely, a black mass not unlike the shadow that Klaus thought he had left behind in Tachibana’s office.

And he roared straight on, faster than he had ever gone before. On either side of the narrow bridge, the canyon dropped away to a dizzying depth. Ahead of him, he watched as the black shadow grew. He knew it would engulf him completely in less than a minute.

The soldiers manning the launcher saw the bike when it first swung into view at the other end of the bridge. They were dumbstruck at first about what a lone bike could do against them. Their gunners tried to take him out but the zig-zagging rider evaded all bullets.

‘Stay in the tank, okay, kid?’ he said, hoping Haruki could still hear him. He didn’t know what would happen when seven nukes went off at once.

Haruki heard and he gasped for air, panic setting in. He gasped for air just as Klaus wondered, for the first time, almost with idle curiosity, whether it would hurt. And how much it would hurt, if it did. He had felt physical pain in almost every way imaginable and so he tried to put it all together as the launcher drew near.

He realised, with no small amount of heart-pounding relish, that the launcher was backing away.

Two full belts of grenades, he thought. He then remembered something he had told Taki after he had blown up the Ouran Bridge in the middle of a sortie that now seemed like child’s play.

_And thas was with the nine grenades I had left. Imagine if I had all twenty. I could win this whole goddamn war._

‘Klaus, please,’ Haruki begged, and every man who heard him felt their hearts tear at the sound of his voice. ‘Please come back.’

Klaus took a breath.

‘I love you, Haruki.’

‘No,’ Haruki sobbed. ‘No, please –'

‘I don’t have much time, kid.’ Klaus’ voice was raised now, coming through in rough patches of static. ‘I need to hear you say it.’

 _‘I love you!_ Klaus, I love you. Please don’t!’

He kept the grenades on their belts, slung over his shoulder and the handlebars. He had to time it properly. He had to ignore his pulse, his heart that was sore over the way Haruki’s voice had called to him. Four with each hand, pins flying behind him, which gave him seven seconds to pull the other eight. The launcher backed up before him at a fraction of his speed, one of its gargantuan tyres even skirting the edge of the bridge in its slow rush.

He was a creature of war. And yet, he had been given a life that was blessed. He felt his chest about to burst with tears that wouldn't come – that couldn't come in his adrenaline rush – with the thought that he had been lucky enough to have known the love of two commanders, to know love that made him feel small and love that made him feel ten feet tall.

He dredged up all the images he could. He realised then that the old adage of one's life flashing before one's eyes wasn't entirely accurate. He had always thought it simply happened without one's control. He discovered it was painfully voluntary. It came from a final act of sheer will, and it was as excruciating as it was beautiful. His mind was first on the way he and Claudia, aged six and eleven, raced down the slope to touch the boathouse. Hans supporting half his weight up the dorm steps the night he had gotten drunk. The first time he ever took off. Dancing with Heidi Reinhart. Pulling Taki out of the barn to kiss his cheek on the pier.

Haruki's eyes in the morning light. Haruki standing by a window with wispy white curtains. A fire-lit office and a moonlit balcony. Haruki turning and smiling each time Klaus came into a room.

As he covered the remaining distance, the bike never once easing off its breakneck speed, he pulled the last two pins with his teeth and laughed at the wonderful and bizarre way his life had turned out. A laugh that was lost to the wind.

_I love you, kid._

His strongest thought was of Haruki.

But his very last thought was of a boy who had asked for him beneath swaying purple flowers.

_I'm coming, Taki._

* * *

The last thing the men heard before the radio cut out, before the explosion whose force would wipe out an entire valley of No Man's Land, was the loud, booming laugh crackling through the speakers — rich and heavy and golden.


	68. Six Minutes

The combined powers of Meiji and Shoda, and the loud, angry urging of Ryoumei, finally moved the fighter jets out of Shikoku and other air bases in the east. They tore past the single patrol plane that was careening away from whatever was about to happen at the Okaminoshi Pass. But they were only in time to witness the explosion, the cloud that erupted into the air, and the waves that travelled outwards with a force that no one expected.

It was a force that was felt in the ground as far as the Reizen province, where Rudi tightened his hold around Midori. In the other direction, it was felt as far as the Eurotean capital.

And although it couldn’t be felt in the Eastern capital, in the bunker beneath the Imperial Palace, Meiji wondered why dread claimed his heart. Why he turned instinctively to look at his knight, as though to reassure himself that Kolya was with him, and safe.

And then the reports began to come through. The launcher was gone. Destroyed on the Okaminoshi Bridge, the bridge itself and the pass reduced to nothing, lost in the explosive force of its own cargo.

‘How?’ Meiji asked, feeling strangely numb.

 _‘We’re not sure, Your Grace,’_ Shoda informed him over the phone. _‘I’m trying to patch through to my men on the front. But it looks like we're safe. No other launchers within sight, and the fighter jets are doing a patrol around the blast radius to be sure.’_

‘Find out what happened,’ Meiji said, still unsure why he was feeling the way did. ‘Tell me as soon as you know.’

_‘Yes, Your Majesty.’_

Kolya emerged from the bunker first, reluctant to let Meiji out in the open air. Every citizen who had heard the siren could still feel it resonating somewhere in their chests.

The emperor, members of his Imperial Guard and his ministers all made their way to the war room where more calls were made and questions asked. But for half an hour, there were very few answers. There was no communicating with anyone in the Eurotean government. Their spies in Eurote reported that the rebels were about to seize power and that the government was in shambles.

Meiji only knew that the Eurotean infantry that had attacked near the border had met a resounding defeat. And that tanks from the Fifteenth Armoured Division were slowly rolling back into their new headquarters.

It worsened, that sense of dread, when Meiji thought of the Fifteenth.

And then finally, at the tail end of half an hour, Shoda rang once more and informed Meiji that Commander Yamamoto wished to speak to His Majesty directly.

‘Put him through,’ Meiji said at once.

He wondered why he was holding his breath in the short space of time it took for the line to be connected.

_‘Your Majesty.’_

The emperor felt a small shock over the sound of Haruki’s voice. It was quiet. Bereft. Completely devoid of life.

_‘The nuclear threat has been eliminated. All hostilities in No Man’s Land have come to an end.’_

Meiji took a moment to absorb his words. ‘Thank you, Commander.’

And then there was a long silence.

 _‘Your Majesty,’_ Haruki repeated, his voice breaking very slightly. _‘Captain – Captain Klaus von Wolfstadt was killed in action this afternoon.’_

Meiji felt winded. Blood rushed from his head and he slowly sat down.

 _‘He took down the bridge over the Okaminoshi Pass in order to destroy the missile launcher, before it could get within range of our border.’_ Haruki was speaking slowly, his voice somehow both tremulous and steady. It was as though he was speaking just to hear it said out loud. _‘We lost contact with him… shortly before the impact.’_

For several long seconds, Meiji didn't know what to say.

‘Commander,’ he breathed into the phone. The table in the war room had suddenly gone silent. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Another long silence. Meiji couldn’t tell what was taking place on the other end of the line.

 _‘Your Majesty,’_ Haruki replied, his voice still the same. Quiet. Steady. Shaking. Like he was only just holding himself together and would break at any moment.

After setting the phone down, the tremor in Haruki’s voice stayed with Meiji. He felt the shock slowly giving way, crumbling like ancient stone, into grief.

‘Meiji-sama?’

Kolya alone was able to address the emperor by his name. His deep voice drew Meiji’s gaze up.

‘Klaus is gone,’ he said.

Kolya felt the shock far more keenly than he thought he would. He recalled, for a fleeting moment, the way Klaus had slapped him on the shoulder on the boardwalk outside the Throne Room before going to Haruki’s side.

Then something far worse occurred to him. And his heart was suddenly as heavy as a rock.

‘Haruki,’ he said, almost under his breath.

Meiji met his eye, and something changed in his expression.

‘Go,’ the emperor said, his voice gentle but resolute. ‘Go for as long he needs you.’

It took Kolya a little while longer than Meiji to grasp the nature of the situation. But as soon as it made itself clear, he understood what Meiji meant and the wisdom and generosity of Meiji’s command.

‘Will you be okay?’ he asked.

‘I’ll be fine.’

Kolya felt love and gratitude in equal measure when he knelt before Meiji and kissed his hand; an age-old, implicit promise that he would return. He then walked past ministers and guards and out of the war room, his heart heavy for his former master.

* * *

The blast was felt for miles and miles. It shuddered through the land in every direction. It shuddered through Onokami.

And Haruki doubled up in his seat, the talons crushing him completely, leaving no room for breath.

He heard Azusa calling to him.

After a few seconds he straightened, blinded by tears, by a grief that felt like surely he himself had been the one who had just died, and he stood up to lift the hatch. To find, to save, to salvage, to follow. He was guided only by the innate conviction that Klaus was where he needed to be.

A hand on his jacket kept him from reaching the hatch.

‘Commander!’

Haruki blinked, still gasping for breath, and looked down.

‘Don't, sir, please! He said not to leave the tank.’

Azusa was crying too. One of his headphones had slipped off and was dangling near his neck.

'Sir, we need you.'

His tears, his words, broke through to Haruki.

He heard the small sounds coming from his own throat. Coming up from his chest and gut. Little stubs of sounds, the shock finding holes in his body. But he focused. The tanks and the men. The tanks and the men. His men.

He pulled himself together. Klaus was still alive. He was still out there, they would patch through to him soon, and they would hear his voice and he would laugh at them all for thinking he was gone. It was the only thing that kept Haruki upright. The only thing that landed him back in his seat, still gasping for breath but lucid enough to give instructions to a relieved Azusa, whose tears hadn't subsided either.

‘Fall back,' he said, voice shaking. 'All units return to base.'

It took a while before he was able to give that same order to his own crew. Turning around, turning his back on where Klaus was, felt like he was giving up. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. He never would. But his men in the tank were in danger the longer they remained in No Man’s Land where the blast waves still permeated.

They turned.

And Haruki’s initial panic – that initial overwhelming fear, his worst fears coming to life, playing slowly before him in words that had been calm and measured almost to the end – gradually dimmed the further they retreated, the closer the border loomed. In fact, the receding of his panic was so complete that he didn’t even recognise it as denial. All he knew was that it hadn’t happened, that Klaus had escaped, and that any reality where that wasn’t the case wasn’t a reality that he could fathom, or be a part of. The talons had crushed him so completely that he could barely feel them there. They weren’t there. But Klaus still was.

They rolled past the Eurotean infantry division, men lying dead, men being taken prisoner. It was all happening in a world that was alongside Haruki’s own. Images on a screen or a projector. They slid before him one at a time; disembarking in the new headquarters of the Fifteenth, beneath the curved eaves of the old fortress, and then going inside, up the stairs, all the way to the lookout and telegraph room in the upper storey of the fortress which looked out into No Man’s Land. He ordered, in a voice that came from far away, for all radios to tune in to a certain frequency and only that frequency. To let him know if they heard anything. A single word. The faintest breath.

And he stared out at No Man’s Land in silence, with the radio and telegraph operators working around him, for minutes that stretched on and on. The men who dared to flick a glance at their commander wondered why their hearts pounded at the look on his face.

He waited, unblinking, for a single streak to come through out of the pit that had opened in the heart of No Man’s Land. A streak billowing dust in its wake, sunlight glinting off hair the colour of wheat.

When the movements of each soldier out there, the sudden appearance of any vehicle whether a truck or a jeep, caused his heart to leap to his throat and then collapse once more – when he didn’t think he could handle the feelings doled out in those insidious little heaps, he finally turned away from the window.

But he still waited. He hoped for every set of steps and every engine and every distant trill of a phone call to be Klaus’ return. Proof of what Klaus himself had said as he lay with Haruki in a small room off a small study in a western embassy.

_Turns out I can't die._

Haruki found he was holding Klaus to that, almost angrily. Klaus wouldn't have been cruel enough to say it if it wasn't true.

For half an hour, he ignored Hasebe and Tansho insisting that he return Shoda’s calls. The first time their reports and urging got through to him was when they mentioned the list of casualties. Haruki glanced down at the list that had been pressed into his hand. Far too many had fallen at the hands of the Euroteans, and every single one in the infantry division had been exposed to the fallout.

‘Get them all to the nearest hospital,’ he said. ‘Not just an infirmary, a proper hospital. Run every test, spare no expense.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The list of injured or at-risk was long. On the next page was the list of the fallen, which was mercifully shorter.

And he saw Klaus’ name. It seemed, in that moment, more of an aberration, a typographical error, rather than anything that injected him back into reality. But it did leave him winded. He placed the list on the nearest table and leaned on it heavily for support, eyes closed.

He had felt the shudder when he was inside Onokami.

He had heard the laugh that crackled through the speakers.

_I love you, kid._

‘Sir?’ Tansho said.

Dry. Dizzy. Numb. Hollow. There was nothing left in him. No tears, no emotions. He was simply an emissary in this cruel new place, and he would act accordingly until he found his way back out.

‘Sir,’ Tansho said hesitantly. ‘General Shoda’s on the line again.’

Haruki’s eyes darted from one nothing to another. And he slowly nodded.

He spoke to Shoda. And then he was put through to the palace.

After he set the phone down, after Meiji’s mellow voice spoke to him of an emotion that hadn’t yet reached him, he asked Hasebe what else needed to be done. But Hasebe had heard the commander’s conversation with the emperor. And, through his own shock and something that he realised came uncomfortably close to grief, he gently told the commander that he would take over and that Haruki should go home.

And so, after only a short pause, Haruki left.

* * *

He didn’t remember much from that point on. He remembered sitting in his car, the one that Klaus had driven from the Reizen residence, the one in which Klaus had leaned over to hold him when they felt the tremor of the missile that hit. He remembered driving, but he didn’t understand how it was possible that he made it all the way back, without any real sense of direction, to the home he had only recently bought.

And there, in the driveway, was a motorbike.

The flare that ignited in his chest was a very real physical pain. It almost made him nauseous.

And it compounded the awful realisation, only seconds later, that it wasn’t Klaus’. It wasn’t the bike with the pale yellow fenders and seat that he himself had fixed up and put together for Klaus before he had even arrived at the compound. This bike’s colouring was black and silver. A newer model.

And Haruki looked at the front door, where Kolya got to his feet off the front step.

Haruki fumbled with the door handle and stepped out of the car. He walked up the white gravel driveway towards Kolya, past the lattice fence of the nearest courtyard, all of which still seemed far away.

He hadn’t seen Kolya for some time, he realised. Weeks. Not since he had been knighted. He saw the look in Kolya’s eye.

And it happened then. The numbness – the denial that had been protecting him ever since he ordered Onokami to turn – finally bottomed out into a huge, gaping pit of grief.

He sagged into Kolya’s chest on his own front step. On the threshold of the home he had bought with Klaus in mind. It burst from him like someone had swung an axe into a water pipe, and he was lost in sudden, choking sobs.

And as Kolya held him, he understood that his intuition from almost a year ago, when he first met Klaus, had been correct but premature. He had thought the day Klaus violated Haruki had fulfilled that foreshadowing. But he realised it was this. This was the real, irreparable pain that Klaus would bring to Haruki.

Kolya also realised, yet again, that there was nothing he could do about it.

* * *

The house was bare, the rooms covered only in tatami mats or polished floorboards. In the west wing, it was quiet enough that one could hear the river murmuring in the distance. The east wing had beautiful framed views of some of the latticed courtyards and the small patches of bamboo; a gentle, soothing green. Some of the rooms were massive, with vast glass doors that opened onto boardwalks in a more modest imitation of the Throne Room in the palace.

But Haruki stayed in one of the smaller rooms. Kolya found futons in the sliding cupboards – something that he found to be a reliable presence in any room in that country – and unrolled one for Haruki. He took the room adjacent.

Hauki didn’t ask why Kolya was there. He had spared a brief few seconds imagining a conversation between Kolya and Meiji that was quite similar to what had actually taken place. But he couldn’t spare any more than that. He couldn’t even spare the effort of feeling grateful, to either of them.

When he and Kolya first came in, they sat on the edge of the genkan, where Haruki had been with Klaus earlier that same day, and Haruki cried until he was spent. Until he felt lightheaded and empty and he realised that grief had crashed in a wave and then drained away again. He understood the mercy of it – that his body would only let it in like that, in awful bursts, and then give him a chance to build a wall of denial around himself again, before the next wave tore it down. He glimpsed the never-ending cycle of it as it stretched away before him.

And then he got up.

He took off his shoes and unclipped the belt around his waist. He took off his jacket and his tie and barely registered it when Kolya, who was only a short step behind him, quietly took them from his hands. He barely noticed when Kolya stepped past him into the room and took out the futon and pillow. He smelled its unfamiliar smell and it helped those walls of numbness to build around him once more. He would have crumbled again if anything near him smelled like Klaus. His rich, golden scent, the faint cedar of his hair.

* * *

Six minutes.

There had been roughly six minutes between Klaus calling to him, saying his name with that strange new note in his voice, and his final transmission. Six minutes that had taken Klaus from him, left an empty, gaping nothing that threatened to stretch on forever.

Haruki couldn’t make sense of it. The imbalance of it. The weight carried in such an obscenely short amount of time surely couldn’t be allowed. It would have skewed the balance of the world. Everything, _everything_ would surely feel the shock of something so unjust.

And if Haruki was still here, still breathing, if the world continued around him like he had seen with his own eyes and relayed over the phone to Meiji, then surely it hadn’t happened.

_I told you, didn't I? The gods won’t let me die._

It was painfully clear that it had been nothing more than a mistake. A mistake of Haruki’s own perceptions, perhaps. A lucid dream. If not, then at least it was a rectifiable mistake the gods had made. They had fumbled for the first time, for only a moment, and let Klaus slip through the net. They would send him back soon with an apology. A bike trailing a cloud of dirt and dust as it tore back through No Man’s Land.

So Haruki waited.

A whole day passed. No calls came from the new compound or from headquarters; Meiji and Hasebe saw to that. In a way, it would have been more merciful if they had called him. If duty brought Haruki back and forced him to do something with his hands. With his voice. With his thoughts.

Instead he remained in that room. In a house that didn’t feel like his.

* * *

He was asleep when the bell rang at the front door. Kolya opened it to Ryoumei.

Ryoumei had been one of the first to take off from Shikoku, one of the first to see the western patrol plane careening back in their direction. He had instinctively ordered everyone to turn back, and they had escaped the edges of the blast, outrun the fallout, in the nick of time.

In the nick of time, and far too late, Ryoumei thought with a guilt that would never leave him. He had fought and fought with his commanding officer to send the jets out as soon as they heard the request from the Fifteenth. As soon as they heard the kind of evil that was crawling towards them. And his requests had been met with hesitation. With a fatal, minutes-long dithering that changed lives.

And after Ryoumei touched down, after he sat through all the tests for radiation sickness, he heard rumours about what had happened. How it was that the missile launcher had been destroyed in the heart of No Man’s Land, far from anyone.

A single rider on a bike. It didn’t seem likely. But it brought back images from ten years ago. Spying a foreigner taking off into No Man’s Land, his outstretched hand grazing the side of Murakumo.

Heart in his mouth, Ryoumei had phoned the division. Between the explosion in No Man’s Land and the fighting against the Eurotean division that had only just ceased on the border, it took a while for his call to be returned.

But they confirmed the rumours. And they confirmed that the only bike that had been dispatched, strictly on a recon basis, had belonged to Captain Wolfstadt, now presumed dead.

Only a few seconds after hearing those words, Ryoumei asked to be put through to Haruki’s Grand Chamberlain and he demanded Haruki’s address from a flustered Tansho.

‘He hasn’t come out of his room,’ Kolya said in response to his question. ‘He hasn’t eaten anything for a whole day.’

From the bag he was holding, Ryoumei fished out two large bottles of sake and scotch and went into the kitchen. ‘Screw eating.’

Haruki awoke, feeling numb and dizzy, to the soft sounds of voices and the chinking of glasses. He could feel that Klaus hadn’t returned yet. He was still out there somewhere. He carried that vague sense, nestled and protected behind barriers that would crumble again and again, as he left his room.

Ryoumei looked up as he came into the kitchen and felt a sharp flare in his chest. Bloodshot eyes, face pale and drained of life.

‘Haruki,’ Ryoumei began.

But he couldn’t say it. He knew, instinctively, that Haruki wasn’t there yet. That any condolences Ryoumei expressed would mean nothing because Klaus wasn’t really gone.

He felt, then, the beginnings of a helplessness that he and Kolya would share over the next two weeks. That Haruki was lost to them. He had retreated to a place that only one person could reach. The one who was gone for good.

So instead, Ryoumei sighed and said, ‘Want a drink?’

Haruki heard his voice from far away. His gaze fell on the bottle in Ryoumei’s hand. The amber scotch. He felt slightly nauseous again. He shook his head, though his throat was parched. He turned to go back into his room before it occurred to him.

‘Why didn’t they send any planes out of Shikoku?’

Ryoumei and Kolya were taken aback. Both at the words and the tone of his voice. It was the first time Kolya had heard him speak since he arrived.

‘They –' Ryoumei began uncertainly. Haruki turned to look at him, his gaze giving nothing away. ‘They did, in the end. We were sent out but we had to turn back when –'

He stopped just short of stepping on the landmine. But Haruki knew what he meant. The planes turned back when they saw the explosion that killed Klaus.

A ringing silence fell in the large kitchen.

 _‘You_ should have flown out,’ Haruki said suddenly, sounding like a different person. ‘Why didn’t you fly out sooner?’

‘What, me alone?’

‘Yes.’

Ryoumei’s heart thudded. Haruki was staring at him suddenly like he was to blame.

‘Haruki, come on. I tried convincing everyone who would listen. They even threatened me with insubordination because I wouldn’t shut up –'

‘You should have gotten into a plane,’ Haruki said, raising his voice. ‘You should have gone out there, if you knew. If you heard what was going on. One plane carrying one bomb would have been enough. Why didn’t you fly out?’

Ryoumei looked at Kolya as though for support, but Kolya looked every bit as lost as he felt. They didn’t recognise the Haruki who stood before them.

‘Why didn’t you?’ Haruki repeated, voice dropping again, eyes abruptly swimming with tears. ‘If I was there, I would have… I would have –'

Ryoumei’s throat ached. He took a step around the counter towards Haruki.

‘Don’t!’ Haruki snapped, lifting his hand in warning, eyes blazing. Again, it was a voice neither he nor the other two recognised.

He disappeared down the hallway, leaving Ryoumei to stare after him.

Haruki slammed the bedroom door, his hair bunched tightly in his hand, his teeth clenching until they hurt, the wave crashing on him yet again. He slammed his fist back on the door near his hip, hard, so it would draw the sudden tearing pain away from a place he couldn’t reach. Kolya heard him on the other side of the door and didn't know whether or not to go in.

A while after Haruki slid to the floor and the sudden rush of tears and anguish subsided, when he reminded himself that Klaus wasn’t gone, because he simply couldn’t be gone, he thought over his awful words to Ryoumei. He realised the gravity of what he had accused him of, and the weight of what he had said Ryoumei should have done. The fastest plane in the world couldn’t have outrun the blast of a bomb drop on a cargo like that. His self-loathing swept him up and brought him to his feet. Kolya looked up when he opened the door.

Leaning forwards over the counter, Ryoumei was halfway through his second glass of scotch when Haruki returned to the kitchen. He was relieved to see the look on Haruki’s face. The eyes that were his own once more, and wide with remorse.

Ryoumei's look forgave before Haruki even made his quiet, slightly shocked apology. He replied by sliding the glass across the counter.

Haruki hesitated for only a moment longer before he picked it up. He threw it back in one gulp.

* * *

Every day for weeks, Haruki awoke feeling dizzy.

This was regardless of whether he had been drinking, and more often than not, he was sober. The dizziness came from the fact that he had suddenly been lurched into a future that made no sense, from a past that was filled with golden eyes and large hands that curled around the slender neck of a mandolin.

‘Dreaming of flying over them?’ Klaus asked, his smile wide, as they stood in the wheat field and Haruki stared across at the distant mountains.

Grief wasn't one thing. Grief was a monster of ever-changing hides. Talons that clenched and loosened but never released their grip. Sometimes there were no tears and Haruki wanted them, wanted to feel the heat of them, to feel like there was still something warm coursing through his body. Other times they came in a torrent that he couldn't stop.

The thought remained, the illusion, that Klaus was somewhere. That he was somewhere, physically elsewhere, even if he wasn't in that room, and that Haruki simply had to wait in order to see him again. Having to correct himself of that illusion, sometimes as often as every few minutes, was what hurt most. That was what would cause his insides to constrict so fast and hard that he would feel momentarily stunned and breathless.

And then he would sometimes try, as much as he could without his heart splintering, to envision the moment of Klaus’ death. He wanted to put himself there, to imagine the heat of the explosion as it tore his skin back, the pain, the nothingness. His fingernails dug into his palm and tears streamed silently. Perhaps if he tried hard enough he could understand. He could understand what had gone through Klaus’ mind and body. Why he felt like it was the only thing he had to do. Or whether it was a choice. Or whether it was some impossible combination of the two.

A week after he arrived, he would hear the sound of Ryoumei speaking to Kolya in an indeterminate part of the house and he would want to tell them to go back. Go back to those who loved them and cared for them. And leave him in his little husk. Even more than the guilt that they were there, Haruki realised he didn’t like the fact that their presence reminded him that life went on. It was barrelling ahead, even though everything should have stopped.

That relentless forward momentum was impossible to bear. He tried to understand that that was it. That was all. There would never be more. What they shared in that little room with the wispy white curtains. In the embassy. In the compound. That was the sum total of everything that would be, everything they would ever share, and now Haruki could only look back and not look forward. Kissing Haruki's hand would now always be the last thing Klaus did.

It was almost easy – almost wrote – that Haruki was to blame for the obvious. For letting Klaus go on the recon mission. He should have shackled Klaus to the base, found someone else to command the Onokami, taken Klaus’ bike and gone himself. Or forced someone, anyone, whether they had scruples about No Man’s Land or not, to go in Klaus’ place. There were a thousand, a million things he could have done differently. For that, he would, simply, never forgive himself, right until his dying day.

But he was sure there was yet more he could blame himself for.

So he would go back over the few days they spent in the cottage, the days leading up to that afternoon, and tortured himself over the smallest things. Leaving Klaus to himself in the rose garden. Playing the record. Fixing the vase. He would torture himself with questions about what he could have done or done differently.

And the anger he had felt for a few minutes towards Ryoumei, that baseless, irrational anger, was occasionally directed at others too. Those whose culpability was less obvious than Rossi’s, or Shoda’s, or the commanders who had waited too long to send out the fighter jets. He was angry at Meiji for having decommissioned long-range nukes that could have taken out an entire area of No Man’s Land. He was angry at the pilot in the western patrol plane for having been unable to identify the cargo that was right beneath it. He was angry at the faceless man in the weapons hold who handed Klaus his grenades. He was angry at everyone, everyone who had a hand in leading to that moment, and his anger at everyone else only heightened his loathing of himself.

In quieter moments, when the aimless anger abated, he would find himself bargaining while lying in his futon at night, or sitting outside by the green pond during the day, or while silently listening to snatches of Ryoumei’s quiet voice and, very occasionally, Kolya’s deep one. He would bargain with the powers that be. Just once more. He would give his own life easily, willingly, for just one more day. One more minute. Not even to talk to him; Haruki wouldn’t waste that precious minute by burdening Klaus with questions or demands or reprimands or tears. He would just hold Klaus and kiss his mouth and his hands and hold him and hold him. And then he would let Klaus go. He promised that he would let him go if he could do just that, just because Klaus had been taken so quickly that surely this was the least that could happen. Surely that much could happen, and then he would agree to let Klaus go.

He knew, and he knew that whatever was listening also knew, that if he was given that minute, he wouldn’t ever let go. But it was a lie he told himself as he bargained. He bargained and pleaded and dreamed of Klaus’ scent and his smile and his scar.

* * *

Ryoumei stayed for more than two weeks. He told Keiko over the phone what had happened and loved her for her quick, unadorned command, one that was a lot like Meiji’s, telling him to remain for as long as he needed to. Over the past year, she had gotten used to the part of the soldier’s wife, and if a few more weeks of absence was the only price she had to pay for the gods’ grace in seeing her husband through the war and returning him to her alive and unharmed, she would gladly pay it. She let Sakura gurgle into the phone and pictured Ryoumei’s smile on the other end.

In those two weeks, Ryoumei watched Haruki come and go. The Haruki he had known since they were children would surface for a minute or two sometimes, and it brought him a flicker of hope, even though he knew that Haruki didn’t exist far beneath the surface.

And though he rarely saw or heard Haruki cry or give in to the grief, he always saw the effects of it a few hours later, or the following morning. He saw it even more in Haruki’s listlessness than his perpetually bloodshot eyes and pale lips.

He blamed himself, with a strength that surprised him, for what had become of Haruki. For things that went beyond the delays at Shikoku. He regretted ever getting on the train that took him to the west and knocking on the door of the cottage so that Klaus, who almost resembled Haruki now, could open it and invite him in. He sometimes even blamed himself for a moment he hadn’t thought about in years; for being the one who had encouraged Haruki to keep searching for Klaus after Taki exiled him. For letting him run off with Klaus to No Man’s Land all those years ago. Perhaps if he had listened to reason, done one thing differently, he could have spared his best friend all of this pain. Pain that hurt him to watch.

In the two weeks he was there, he saw Haruki smile only once. That happened on the final night Ryoumei spent in that house. He had taken on board all cooking duties, since Kolya didn’t know so much as how to crack an egg into a pan. But that night, he’d had enough of chopping and frying and so he had tried to get Kolya to help him.

They were both pleased when Haruki quietly took a seat at the counter behind them.

They had found, by then, that it was best to leave him be. During his better moments, Haruki would join the tail end of one of their conversations, though, as Ryoumei complained, it was never so much a conversation as him talking one-sidedly in the general direction of Kolya. He would sometimes ask about whether they’d heard from headquarters or the palace or the new compound. Ryoumei offered clipped information where he could, not wanting Haruki to be drawn back into that world.

He didn’t let Haruki read the newspapers, where Okaminoshi was taking on the same kind of nominal gravity that Roskilde had once had. The radio was only ever turned on low when Haruki was asleep, or when there was music playing. And in fact, music was another landmine. Haruki had once come to Ryoumei’s room and asked him to switch off the radio when it was playing a slow jazz number, one which Ryoumei hadn’t even been paying attention to.

The only thing Ryoumei tried to urge Haruki to do, gently, and only once, was to return Claudia’s calls and letters. But after seeing the look in Haruki’s eye and how quickly Haruki drew into himself, Ryoumei didn’t ask again.

And they had spoken of Klaus only once, on a night when they drank together, when Haruki simply said it was all his fault. And Ryoumei, who had been thinking about it from every possible angle, explained to him exactly why it wasn’t. But he knew it didn’t make any difference.

Still, it relieved him to see that Haruki, in some ways, seemed to be getting better. And so he told Keiko that he was thinking about returning. The evening before his departure, when Haruki sat at the counter, Ryoumei gave Haruki a quick smile over his shoulder before turning back to Kolya.

‘No!’ he complained in a loud drawl before drawing the chopping board towards himself. The carrots, which were supposed to have been finely sliced, had been roughly hewn into chunks. ‘We’re trying to make a stir fry, not bottle corks.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘Here, just peel these potatoes. Have you really never cooked a day in your goddamn life?’

Kolya thought about it seriously. ‘I tried to help when my grandmother cooked. But she didn’t like it because I broke things without meaning to.’

‘So you just stopped helping?’

‘She banished me from the kitchen.’

Ryoumei gave him a look. ‘That’s a little dramatic.’

Haruki felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. He realised that must have come from a time before Kolya knew how to channel and control his own strength.

Ryoumei checked the state of the onions in the pan before turning. ‘I mean, you’re fucking hopeless but at least you can peel a – what the hell are you doing?’

He snatched the potato out of Kolya’s hands. It had been sheared to a fraction of its size.

‘Sorry,’ Kolya repeated automatically, still holding the peeler.

Ryoumei swore under his breath as he stared at the long potato skins on the counter, each attached to a very thick slice of flesh. He sighed. ‘Fuck it. We’re having fried potato chips.’

And, to his surprise, he looked up to see Haruki smiling faintly. Ryoumei's heart lifted.

He turned back to Kolya. ‘Out of the kitchen, now. Go! God, for someone who can fall out of a plane and bust an emperor out of captivity…’ After Kolya somewhat sheepishly stepped around the counter, Ryoumei looked at Haruki, hoping to capitalise on his mood. ‘Any chance you’ve learned how to do anything with food since flight school?’

Another landmine.

Both Ryoumei and Kolya saw it before Haruki was even aware that it showed on his face. Klaus declaring the paella was top notch before he leaned over and kissed him. A kiss carrying hints of paprika.

He felt sick again. His throat closed up. So he got up and quietly excused himself, leaving the other two to stare after him once more.

Ryoumei sighed as he thought about it the next morning. He told Haruki in a gruff, awkward voice that he ought to call if he needed anything, and that both he and Keiko would be able to make it there with virtually no notice. Haruki had dully thanked him, his eyes elsewhere.

Kolya saw Ryoumei out.

‘How long are you planning to stick around?’ Ryoumei asked, his face drawn.

Kolya looked down the hallway where Haruki’s bedroom door was closing.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

He wasn’t sure when, but he knew it wasn’t now.

Ryoumei nodded slowly.

‘Try to get him to talk to Klaus’ sister,’ he said quietly. ‘I think it’ll help. Maybe.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll swing back when I can. Stay out of the kitchen.’

By the time Ryoumei made the long drive home, it was evening and his house was quiet. Keiko and Sakura were both fast asleep in the same bed. Ryoumei thought of Haruki, of his heartbreak and his grief, and he suddenly realised how lucky he was. How precious it was, and how it might be taken from him at any moment. He slipped in behind Keiko and pulled her close and she was surprised more by his tears than the fact that he was there.

* * *

_I have a feeling it'll take me to kill me._

Too much had come together, most of it out of nowhere, some of it gathered from across the years like the edges of a broom collecting dust.

But it began to sink in slowly. In a way that would take days, and in some ways much longer. It had been Klaus' choice. He had done it himself. And what came with that realisation, though vague in the beginning, would twist into him further over time. It had been Klaus' choice. And he had chosen Taki.

Haruki had given everything. He had begged and begged, in front of men who, out of shock and love for their commander, hadn’t mentioned the last few lines of their transmission in any of their reports. And no matter how much Haruki had pleaded, Klaus had chosen Taki.

It was the first layer and the last. In between there were nuances that Haruki would pick apart and try to put back together like it was a radio or gramophone or vase. Nuances like the fact that he had done it to save Haruki. To protect him and protect many others. Nuances like the fact that he had told Haruki on the airwaves, heedless of all those who could hear, that he loved him. But they were all nuances. The first and last layer was Klaus’ choice. The choice to die with his true master than live with Haruki.

And Haruki drowned in that one thought.

If Ryoumei had seen him improving over those two weeks, it was only because he had learned to hide his grief better. He would sometimes come up for air when a voice that sounded like his father's, a voice that was suddenly comforting, told him that he was a disgrace. A mark on the family name. Someone like him never deserved Klaus in the first place. He was never worthy. And so this made sense. The idea that it was merely an imbalance that had been corrected came like a cool, soothing breeze. He was able to take in air again. But those moments were short and sporadic.

Mostly he was underwater and he could barely breathe. Klaus had been his. Klaus had told him, time and again, that he loved him. Then why? Why?

He couldn't tell sometimes whether the question itself or its obvious answer was more painful.

One night, he awoke in a fit of sobbing when he realised that if he had only asked Klaus to be his knight, if Klaus had said yes and they were bound to one another for life, then perhaps, just perhaps, he would have felt a stronger connection to Haruki. A stronger connection that would have pulled him back.

Klaus’ final choice carried the illusion that he had simply been holding on. He had held on for over two years and then he had finally let go when the excuse, a real excuse, had presented itself to him. It was as though, in his final act, Haruki finally saw too late the real workings of his heart which, thanks to his breathtaking, incorrigible stupidity, he had never really wanted to see.

Weeks later, Haruki would slowly begin to understand that those awful thoughts were, in fact, nothing more than an illusion. He slowly learned to understand that Klaus’ choice hadn’t been that simple. Reality, as he had come to realise many times before, was never that simple. The whole picture came to him years later, and even then it didn’t arrive in the same burst of clarity that Klaus had experienced in those six minutes.

* * *

Klaus knew he could have pulled himself up. But he let go.

He had something with Haruki that no earthly power could break. The only thing that could have broken it was a power that was unearthly. The pull that went beyond his body, beyond death, and the one that finally dragged him under when the thought that Haruki’s life was in danger. He couldn’t summon the energy to fight for that fleeting chance that he and Haruki would make it out alive. Against those odds, in that one small moment, the forfeit of his life came to him peacefully. Without qualms, without struggle, and with the promise that he would finally find peace.

And find Taki.

In those six minutes, a lot of things fell into place, things that had haunted him and tormented him for so long suddenly lining up and fitting together in a picture that was vivid and blinding. And his only desperate wish was that he could have conveyed it all to Haruki. To thank him for everything, for giving him a kind of happiness he didn’t think possible, and for giving him his own hand at writing his own life. His life was his, and almost his with Haruki, even if, in the end, his death and his destiny were always Taki’s.

In those six minutes, there was never a sense that Klaus had broken his vow to Claudia. The simple vow he made to Claudia in the kitchen in their cottage had been that he wouldn’t take his own life out of grief. Two full years later, he finally did so, but it was done for both his masters, and it wasn't done out of sorrow.

The one thing Klaus didn’t think of doing, or even wish he had the time to do, was apologise. Despite hearing Haruki’s desperation and the heartrending way Haruki had told him he loved him one final time, remorse and regret were far from Klaus’ mind. In those six minutes, he had room only for that boundless gratitude, that fierce, endless love and that final, definitive peace.

* * *

One night, a few nights after Ryoumei left, Klaus finally came back to him.

He lay down in the futon behind Haruki. Huge arms pulled Haruki against a broad chest.

'Hey, kid,' he said, before letting out a long sigh. 'Sorry it took me so long.'

And Haruki cried and cried.

* * *

Kolya stayed for much longer than Ryoumei. He would phone the palace often after Haruki had gone to sleep and he would speak to Meiji quietly. He would ask questions about the temporary head of the Imperial Guard and lapse into frustrated silence when it sounded like he wasn’t being as stringent as Kolya had been and Meiji would laugh softly and tell him everything was fine.

And he would apologise for having been away for so long. And Meiji would tell him that he understood. They both owed a great deal to the young commander. Meiji knew exactly the kind of pain he was in. He even imagined Haruki to be in that room to which he had been confined all those years ago, before he heard of Sotaro’s death. And so it soothed the pain of Meiji’s own past to send Kolya to Haruki. It was as though he was sending Sotaro in to a younger version of himself who was lying alone in a bare room.

Haruki, by then, had called in to headquarters. He had to do something with his endless, empty days. Although he couldn’t bring himself to put on his uniform, he sat at the counter in the kitchen and gave orders to Tansho and Hasebe and consulted with Shoda. They were still establishing their new headquarters, they were decommissioning Tachibana’s weapons, they were sending in forces to help solidify the rebel takeover of Eurote. There was work to be done and Haruki did what he could from where he was. Kolya would watch him silently as he worked, sometimes passing him the telegram or document that had arrived in the mail.

And as soon as the phone was replaced on its hook, Kolya watched Haruki crumple slightly. Sometimes it was immediate, other times it would take him a few minutes.

Sometime in the fourth week, Haruki went to the large room in the west wing of the house. The one with the long glass door that opened onto the boardwalk. The room that would have been their bedroom. He opened the cupboard and saw Klaus’ things. The small suitcase he had taken when they first boarded the Sagi. And the larger suitcase he had packed when they left the cottage.

Haruki ran his hands over them, the beaten leather, the golden hinges, for several minutes. Then he opened it. He unfolded one of Klaus’ shirts and breathed it in, deeply, until he was in their little room that overlooked the sea and he felt Klaus’ arms around his waist. In the larger suitcase was the mandolin that Haruki had bought for him. He heard that song again, the song without words that sang of cautious hope and aching sorrow, and even though he closed the suitcase and squeezed his eyes shut and cried, he still heard those notes.

_Not bad on this little thing, is it?_

That night, he drank again. He drank much more than he usually did. Usually he drank in his room with Ryoumei, and he would let Ryoumei talk about their days in flight school and he would occasionally chime in, and he would fall asleep before he got too drunk and Ryoumei would be back in his own room by the time Haruki awoke the next morning.

But that night, he drank without stopping. He drank until he couldn’t think or feel. The scotch sloshed about in the bottle and the room went in and out of focus. He stayed away from his futon. Despite the countless times Haruki had slept and awoken alone over the course of his life, he was suddenly aware of the gaping loneliness of a bed with only himself in it. So he slipped outside.

Kolya, who thought Haruki had gone to sleep, checked in on him and was surprised to see his room empty. After a quick search, he found him outside in one of the small courtyards beside the small green pond. And his heart sank. Haruki was sitting on the ground against the lattice fence, one hand holding the near-empty bottle of scotch, and his unfocused eyes off in the distance. It was a still night, without a whisper of wind.

As Kolya approached, Haruki turned his head slowly. Kolya knelt in front of him, gently took the bottle from his hand and moved it away. Haruki didn’t try to stop him. Instead, he watched Kolya with eyes that were both glassy and forlorn.

‘He chose Taki,’ he murmured.

Kolya looked at him in surprise. He had only heard Haruki speak of Klaus once, to Ryoumei. And it hadn’t been like this. In three words, he had captured something that would never be in any reports or any deconstructions of what had happened in Okaminoshi.

It wasn’t something Kolya pretended to know anything about. He didn’t know Klaus. And he certainly didn’t know Taki Reizen. But if what Haruki said was true, there was one thing Kolya now knew for certain. Another crystal-clear shard of certainty that formed there, as he crouched in front of Haruki. He only had to think about everything he had seen and learned in the past year.

‘He chose wrong,’ he said.

Haruki heard Kolya’s words in his typical monotone of complete truth and he felt something break inside him. At the same time, he looked at Kolya differently. He saw how close he was. How long he had remained by Haruki’s side. The warmth and comfort of him.

And then, to Kolya’s complete shock, Haruki pushed off the fence and kissed Kolya’s mouth. Blinking hard, too startled to react, Kolya felt only Haruki’s grip on the front of his shirt, suddenly strong, and Haruki’s lips pressing against his for several seconds.

When Haruki pulled back, Kolya’s insides gave a painful lurch at the look in his eyes. A sudden intensity. A focus that shone like a flashlight in the middle of his drunken haze.

‘Sleep with me,’ Haruki said, his voice whisper-quiet but urgent. Desperate. The grip on Kolya’s shirt pulling him closer. ‘Please. You can – you can pretend I’m Meiji-sama. I don’t mind.’

_I don’t mind. Klaus pretended I was Taki for a long time. I don’t mind._

Kolya’s pulse thudded in his ears. His every instinct was telling him to pull away but he was having trouble focusing and recovering from the shock.

‘Please,’ Haruki breathed, voice shaking slightly, as were the hands on Kolya’s shirt.

Just once. Just so he could shelve the pain, just for a short while.

Kolya swallowed. His heart was breaking yet again at the sound of Haruki’s voice and the request that was being made of him. Where he was then, with his lips still stinging from the kiss and Haruki’s hands clutching him, he couldn’t help but imagine it.

And his stomach churned. Meiji was always in his thoughts, every waking moment, including then. But he was still, in a very slight sense, caught between masters. He still felt that he owed his former master more than he knew. And if this was what Haruki wanted, if this was the only way he could provide some comfort to the master who had saved him and brought him where he was, brought him to Meiji –

He gently prised Haruki’s hands off his shirt and held them in his own. Haruki stared in slight wonder at their size. So similar to Klaus’. Then he looked up to meet Kolya’s steady gaze.

‘Do you want me to?’ Kolya asked, slowly and quietly. He hoped, despite his inability on his best day to put words to his feelings, that he had managed to put the right inflection on the right word. So Haruki knew exactly what he was asking.

Haruki blinked a few times, lightly. And Kolya saw his eyes gradually reclaim their familiar gentleness. ‘No,’ Haruki cried quietly, and the tears flowed again without restraint. He shook his head slowly, drunkenly, before it fell forwards onto Kolya’s shoulder. ‘No. No, I want Klaus.’

Despite the broken words, despite feeling each of Haruki’s sobs through his own body, Kolya closed his eyes briefly and exhaled in relief. After a second or two, he slipped an arm under Haruki and lifted him up. He carried Haruki inside the house and laid him down on the futon. His body was limp from drunkenness. His eyes were already closed, eyelids slightly red and patchy, and each breath slightly laboured.

Kolya waited until Haruki fell asleep. He longed, suddenly, for Klaus to return just so that he could finally kill him with his bare hands.

* * *

He was sitting up on the edge of the futon by the time Haruki awoke the next morning.

Feeling like something inside his head was swollen and pulsing, Haruki turned onto his side and groaned. He saw Kolya out of the corner of his eye and he felt a wave of nausea. It came to him without the merciful veil that drinking usually provided. He remembered it all much too clearly – the kiss and the words – and he suddenly wanted the ground to cave beneath him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. He wanted to lift his head but even the thought of doing so was exhausting. ‘For what I did. And – and said.’

Kolya looked at him evenly. ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

And Haruki knew he meant it. Still, the guilt and shame roiled in his gut along with the scotch.

‘Dont – don’t tell Meiji-sama,’ he implored, hearing how thin and pathetic his voice was.

‘I won’t,’ Kolya said gently.

And again, Haruki knew he meant it. It was the second of two secrets that Kolya would keep from Meiji. And they were both kept for the sake of a former master whom Kolya cared for dearly.

Haruki was relieved when the ensuing silence seemed comfortable, as far as he could tell. He lay still on his side and waited for the thing in his head to shrink slightly, just so it wouldn’t press so insistently against his skull. He realised the mornings were getting colder. Summer had left them. Just outside the window, he spied the sweet pink of the autumn flowers, the kind with tiny, furry orange anthers in the centre.

As Haruki tried to formulate his gentle nudge, to tell Kolya it was high time he returned to the Imperial Palace, Kolya spoke unexpectedly.

‘Meiji-sama asked about you,’ he said. ‘I told him about how we met. And all the things you’ve done. And all the things you’re good at. How you found Kaiser, as well. And other things.’

Haruki was confused, by the words themselves and the fact that Kolya was saying so many of them.

‘He has a theory about you,’ Kolya went on.

‘About me?’

‘He thinks you’re like a healer. Like the ones in the old times, in stories about your country.’

‘A healer?’

‘You fix things. And people,’ he added. He realised it sounded leagues better when Meiji had said it in that beautiful, light voice of his as they lay together on his large four-poster bed.

To Haruki's surprise, Kolya's simple words conjured a small fragment of his childhood. It came to him as though from a dream; Ukiyo relaying the same theory about Haruki's mother, who made people feel better just by being around her. Ukiyo hinting to a wide-eyed child that perhaps such things could be passed on.

But the memory didn’t last long. He thought of Taki’s letter. He had been handed something precious, something Taki had passed to him to care for and protect, and he had failed in the worst possible way. He thought of Kaiser, of Murakumo, of Watanabe and the Rosen Maiden. Every man who died under his cannons or under his command. Everything that was broken, gone, because of him.

‘I'm not a healer.’

Kolya looked at Haruki where he lay – his head visibly aching and his heart in a far worse state – and sorely wished Haruki had someone who could do for him what he had done for others.

‘You fixed me,’ Kolya said.

There was a long silence. The words were there, tangibly, even though Haruki didn't speak.  _I couldn't fix Klaus._ They were there in the tears that threatened to spring once more.

Kolya heard them. _You did,_ he wanted to say. But beyond a vague intuition, beyond the few snippets of what he had seen, he didn't know enough to say so out loud. Instead, he let his eyes travel to the window where he saw the same pink flowers pressing against the pane. He glimpsed the outline of one of the courtyards. The lattice fence and bamboo. He thought, abstractly, of the world beyond. And he remembered what Ryoumei had said.

Fortuitously timed, Haruki held back his tears and said, ‘Kolya. You should go back.' He tried to keep his voice steady and reassuring. 'I’ll be fine.’

‘I will,’ Kolya said slowly. ‘If you will agree to do something first.’

Haruki was surprised. ‘What?’

‘Will you talk to Claudia Strauss?’

Haruki closed his eyes and Kolya saw his eyelids quiver very slightly. There hadn’t been a body. There weren’t even any dog tags. And so the army – the army of Klaus’ homeland, thanks to a last-minute change of alliances – would have sent a folded flag to his next of kin. To Claudia’s door. Each time Haruki imagined it, he felt suffocated. Submerged in fresh waves of grief and self-loathing. How could he ever face Claudia again? Klaus’ niece and nephew?

‘She has left a lot of messages,’ Kolya went on. Then he carefully added, ‘I think it would help her. If you spoke to her.’

He was relieved to see that his phrasing, for once, seemed to help. Haruki opened his eyes and was silent for some time.

‘Okay,’ he said.


	69. Each Flower, in its Own Way

By the time he replaced the phone on the hook, Haruki felt worse.

Insensitive to his plight, the sunlight grew stronger beyond the kitchen window. He noticed it out of the corner of his eye. He inhaled and registered the smell of the house. It was the light, bright scent of wood and varnish, with a hint of the coffee that Kolya had made earlier. It made his stomach churn.

Kolya had given him some privacy but he came back when he heard the lengthy silence. He tried to read Haruki’s expression.

It had been over a month since Klaus’ death. That simple, startling fact made itself known to Haruki when he spoke to Claudia and realised that, despite her quiet tone – the occasional stumble in her voice – she sounded like herself. And relieved that Haruki had called. It was relief that was met with relief, as well as with Haruki’s terrible guilt. He knew his voice sounded far worse off than hers.

After the first few words were exchanged, there came the pause that Haruki had been dreading. The pause that summoned Klaus until they could feel him, as strongly as though he were there between them, next to them, in both east and west.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Haruki said finally. ‘For your loss.’ His voice was reminiscent of the day he had spoken to Meiji. Quiet and steady and only slightly tremulous. ‘I take full responsibility for everything that –’

‘Don’t you dare,’ Claudia said softly, as though she had been expecting to hear that. ‘You did everything you could. I know you did. The reason I wanted to talk to you was to… I wanted to…’

Haruki waited, hearing his heart race and feeling the grief closing around him once more. But it was one of those mornings when he felt too dry and barren for tears.

‘Oh, I can’t do this over the phone,’ she said finally, sounding slightly frustrated with herself. ‘Haruki... I’m sure you must be busy, but if you ever have the time, I would love to see you and talk to you properly. I hope you know you’re always welcome here.’

Haruki’s felt a surge of anxiety and nausea at the mere thought of seeing the cottage again. He refused at once, as graciously as he could.

‘Well,’ Claudia said, a little sadly but trying to keep her voice light. ‘If you ever change your mind...’

After a pause, she thanked him for calling. Once the phones were placed back on their hooks, Haruki’s in his large kitchen and Claudia’s in her small one, Klaus’ presence seemed to ebb slowly.

And Haruki felt grey clouds billowing, both inside him and just above his browline. But the sunlight strengthened outside and Kolya waited almost expectantly and Haruki found himself telling Kolya, briefly, about what had been said.

‘Maybe you should go,’ Kolya tried.

Haruki absently shook his head, as though it were self-evident. Kolya watched, heart heavy again, realising there there wasn’t much else he could do. And because he had promised Haruki he would, he left that day and returned to the palace.

_You did everything you could. I know you did._

Haruki despaired and marvelled over the quiet strength of Claudia’s words. He wondered if she would ever come to realise that she was wrong and that so much of it had been his fault. But he also dared to wonder whether perhaps he could live through her conviction, whether she was wrong or not.

He tried to, over the next few days. He sat on the boardwalk outside the large room that would have been their bedroom. He listened to the river. He listened to the stillness in the air. But sometimes he heard the echo of the siren. And it would make him close his eyes. And he would remember everything he had done wrong. All the ways in which he hadn’t been good enough.

And then Kolya appeared again on his front step.

* * *

Kolya had returned to Meiji in the middle of the day. The emperor had been in his office speaking to his Minister of Trade, but he had dismissed the room as soon as his attendant announced the return of his knight.

They spent the next few hours in Meiji’s large four-poster. Kolya by then had already learned the sweetness of returning to his master; the sense that he had done right and that his master was pleased to see him, but it was a feeling that was multiplied by his extended absence. He held Meiji down against crisp white sheets with a kiss, the warmth of Meiji’s mouth melding with the warmth of his body as Kolya thrust in, and he felt again the inimitable sense that he was home, that there was nowhere else in the world that would feel like this. He also suddenly felt heady with a kind of gratitude that he hadn’t experienced before. And when Meiji was pressed against him afterwards, both quiet, both drinking in the simple happiness of being in one another’s presence, he realised his gratitude was settling into an uncomfortable kind of guilt. It was the same feeling Ryoumei had experienced when he returned to Keiko. He suddenly felt he didn’t deserve to be there when Haruki was alone and in so much pain.

Meiji could tell Kolya was preoccupied. They spoke of everything – almost everything – that had happened in the past month. All the ways in which the young commander seemed to have improved and the great many ways in which he was still lost.

And Kolya mentioned what Claudia had said. The request that had been met with quiet refusal.

Meiji thought about it for some time.

He had dealt with the grief of Klaus’ loss in his own way. He had overseen the placement of the statue that had been erected for Klaus in the public National War Memorial; a small gilded wolf on a circular platform in the outdoor gardens, ringed with flowers of all kinds and before which was a bronze plaque bearing a simple message.

 _A soldier_  
_A knight_  
_A hero_  
_Of both east and west._  
_He came to us a foreigner_  
_But he will forever be remembered_  
_As one of our own._

Meiji had also gone to the war room when it was empty, the room that had seen triumph and defeat countless times over the long reign of each emperor. He glanced at the seat where Klaus had been once, long ago, when Meiji leaned over and declared that the two of them might be alone in having a sense of humour in that country. He remembered the broad grin and the quiet chuckle and the reply that was warm and rumbling even in an undertone.

One afternoon, Meiji even asked his attendant to bring him some herring from the kitchen and he had spent a quiet few hours feeding the heron by the rushes of the pond.

He thought about all of that, and he thought of Haruki, when the idea came to him.

‘I’ve been meaning to award Klaus the Order of the Chrysanthemum,’ he said to Kolya, on the point of saying the word ‘posthumously’ before finding he was unable to do so. ‘I was waiting to give it to Haruki on his behalf. But I just had a thought.’ He looked up and touched Kolya’s face. ‘If you don’t mind being separated from me one last time.’

And so Kolya stood on Haruki’s front step only a few days after he had left. When Haruki opened the door, Kolya informed him that the emperor was sending him, personally, to the Strausses' home in the west in order to give them the medal on Klaus’ behalf.

Haruki stared in silence for several seconds.

‘The Order of the…’ he began, aware that he sounded dazed.

‘It is the highest military honour in the country.’

‘I – I know what it is. But why are _you_ being sent to –?’

And then it occurred to Haruki why it might be. And why Kolya had stopped by his house first.

‘I would be grateful if you accompanied me,’ Kolya said, more stiffly than usual. ‘Since I do not speak the language of the west very well. And since I do not know any of the Strausses.’

‘Kolya…’ Haruki sighed, anger flaring at both Kolya and Meiji. ‘I – I can’t go –’

‘I must go whether you accompany me or not,’ Kolya said, his tone even and quiet. ‘My master has ordered it.’

And yet again, Haruki knew he meant it.

Back in the palace, Kolya had been doubtful that Haruki would ever agree to it, or whether the objective itself would help. He tried explaining to Meiji that Haruki, for the most part, seemed to get better when he was left to himself. Meiji had smiled.

‘Sometimes, people who hold their true feelings inside a fortress need a little urging to let the drawbridge down.’

Haruki didn’t know what it was. Perhaps it was a combination of Kolya’s stiffness as well as the warmth of Claudia’s voice over the phone, both asking for the same thing. Perhaps it was the latent thought of how improper it was – how cowardly of him – if Claudia were to receive such an honour from someone who hadn’t been Klaus’ commanding officer. He realised how obvious it would be, then more than ever, that he was hiding from his guilt.

And as much as he longed to hide, even though he knew he could easily bury himself under months and years of hiding, he instead slowly packed a bag and sent word to Claudia.

Before he left, the thought occurred to him that a trip of three days would take only hours if they took the _Sagi._  But he cast only a fleeting gaze at the hangar towards the back of the large property. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it, let alone fly it. But one day, he knew, he would have to take it back. The plane, like everything else Klaus had owned, now belonged to his family.

* * *

As Claudia explained in one of her letters, which Haruki had finally read before calling her, the cottage had fallen back to the family. Instead of selling it, they had decided to move back in for good. With Wilhelm close to retiring, Heinrich at boarding school and Eva getting ready to move into college, there was no point remaining in the city any longer.

It made Haruki feel better that Kolya was with him. His frustration towards both Kolya and Meiji began to recede. As the train sped them closer to the west, he realised he had to do it, no matter how much it hurt. He deserved to feel it, to face it. It was the final hurdle he would put himself through before he returned to let the grief swallow him up completely.

He pictured Claudia holding his hand for a few seconds, her eyes swimming with tears when she took the medal. He would refuse her offer to come in for a cup of tea, and he and Kolya would walk past golden fields and Haruki would let all of it, every part of it tear at him. He allowed himself the small comfort that Kolya would be beside him at least then, and at least for the journey home.

It was raining when they arrived. The palace had arranged for a car to meet them at the station, and in a short time it was winding between stalks that were rendered a pale, subdued yellow behind a sheet of rain. They reached the front porch.

Haruki’s projection of what would happen was only accurate in some ways. He didn’t expect Claudia to pull him into an embrace that lasted so long that he was left feeling amazed by the totality of his numbness – he felt nothing. He did expect her eyes to mist over when Kolya handed her the medal, bestowed on her brother by His Imperial Majesty, the emperor of the east. She picked it up off the velvet base. Held in her dainty fingers, the four-pointed medal with its stylised orange chrysanthemums looked particularly beautiful. Beautiful and pointless, Haruki thought, feeling empty.

He had foreseen her quiet thank you. He had even foreseen that she would hold his hand in hers for some seconds.

But he didn’t expect her to insist that he and Kolya remain at the cottage for a day or two.

It brought him quite forcefully back to a time when Taki had asked the same. And he should have refused then, he realised. Just like he should refuse now. But Claudia jumped on his hesitation. She ducked out into the rain, holding an arm over her head, and told the driver to go back.

‘Mrs Strauss –’ Haruki tried, to no avail.

‘Claudia, please,’ she reminded him when she was back on the porch, wiping wet hair from her face. ‘It’ll be awkward if you insist on calling me Mrs Strauss the whole time you’re here.’

Haruki stared, feeling helpless once more. He received no support whatsoever from Kolya, who stood nearby, silent and expressionless. The car drove away slowly between wheat stalks and rain.

So Haruki followed his numbness inside, feeling like a husk again, being blown about at the whim of the gods.

* * *

At forty-two, Claudia looked much the same as the vague memory Haruki held of her from a few years ago. He found a strange kind of relief in the fact that he didn’t see anything of Klaus in her round, open features, nor in those of Eva, who brought tea and cake to the living room and introduced herself. She was taller than Claudia, her hair cut short in a style that curled up just near her ears.

Wilhelm Strauss also appeared and shook Haruki’s hand with a gruff civility. He was in his sixties now, his hair more salt than pepper, but his body was still strong and limber, eyes still a bright, light blue.

Haruki was told he had just missed Heinrich, who had returned to his dorm the previous week for the start of a new school year.

‘Poor thing,’ Claudia said, her voice softening. ‘When he was here, he couldn’t stand to look at his old model airplane anymore. The little red one. He put it away somewhere.’

Haruki’s numbness threatened to break into sorrow for the first time. It sounded like the same reason the _Sagi_ was still in the hangar.

The memory of Heinrich’s reaction to the news of his uncle's death seemed to have affected Claudia too. She was moved to tears again; proper tears this time. She stood by the small bureau against the window and cried, with a hand covering her mouth. A little shocked, Haruki stood still, unsure of what to do. Wilhelm came to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Haruki turned away, as did Kolya, both suddenly realising they ought to have been more adamant about refusing her offer to stay.

Claudia remembered the day Emmerich called her home in the city. She remembered the pinprick of dread she felt when she heard her older brother’s tone; a quiver she had only heard twice before, once when they lost their mother and then their father.

And so she knew already, before she even heard the words. But it didn’t soften the blow. 

The call she had been dreading ever since the very first war. The feeling that rushed to her head and made her feel faint. The sense that she had lost someone she ought to have protected, someone she had tried to protect since she first held him in her arms at age five. And she realised for the first time that Emmerich, despite his estrangement from Klaus, must be feeling the same way. They cried silently over the loss of their little brother.

The final time she had seen Klaus was over a year ago when he came to say goodbye and made a whimsical promise he didn't keep.

_Last time I said I probably wouldn’t be coming back, remember? That didn’t turn out to be the case. So don’t worry, I’ll be back this time too._

Standing before the bureau of the cottage, she felt Wilhelm’s arm around her shoulders. The comforting words in her ear. She blinked away her tears and reassured him. She nodded and smiled. Wilhelm watched her carefully for a few more moments before he turned and excused himself. Eva, who was crying too, followed suit.

Haruki, who was feeling himself come undone again, wished more than anything that he could do the same.

Claudia then drew something out of the bureau and took a steady breath before she turned.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘That tends to happen to me from time to time. Over the silliest things.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Please, sit.’

Claudia poured tea and Haruki had trouble, at first, tuning in to what she was saying. She mentioned the family lawyer, something about estates and properties, and he was brought back only when he heard Klaus’ name.

‘Our lawyer said that you had both planned to hire workers on a permanent basis to take care of the farm,’ she said. ‘And that you wanted the proceeds of the harvest to go to our family.’

‘Yes,’ Haruki finally managed, vaguely remembering having talked about it with Klaus only weeks ago, weeks that were a bridge into a life that no longer applied.

‘I don’t know if you know, but Klaus had a will drafted years ago, just after Taki died,’ Claudia went on. ‘He left everything to us. The lawyer said he didn’t change it at all in the years since he wrote it. Except once, just last month, when he called to make the new arrangements for this place.’

She handed him the sealed envelope she had taken from the bureau. ‘He left you the _Sagi.’_

Heart in his mouth, Haruki opened the envelope. A logo in the corner on the first page identified the office of the Wolfstadt family lawyers. There was legal jargon that flew clean over Haruki’s head, passing ownership of the aircraft to him. And on the second page was a photocopied letter in Klaus’ sharp, slanted writing.

_Hey kid,_

Hot tears sprang to Haruki's eyes without any warning. It was like he could hear Klaus’ voice in his ear, low and rumbling. Klaus’ words. Words he hadn’t yet heard. He pulled himself together, his throat clogged with tears, in order to read on.

_To think I spent all that time being jealous of Kolya when really I should have been jealous of a pair of cuff links._

_Well, screw that guy. He gives you little brass airplanes – I’ll give you a real plane._

_The Sagi’s yours._

_Klaus_

That was all there was. Haruki laughed and cried at the same time.

There was nothing more, nothing heavy or long-drawn or yearning. It had clearly been written without any further thought, with the simple desire to pass on the _Sagi,_ just in case. It had clearly been written by someone who hadn’t planned on dying for a long time.

Claudia, having succumbed to tears again, smiled as she watched Haruki’s reaction.

‘The lawyer said he couldn’t make head or tail of the letter,’ she said, wiping her face. ‘But you know how it is, they have to send it along with everything else. Does it mean anything to you?’

Haruki only nodded, taking shallow breaths between tears.

‘I was about to send it in the mail,’ Claudia said. ‘I came close to sending it so many times, since you already had the _Sagi_ anyway, but I was hoping to see you first. I’m so glad you came.’

When he didn’t reply, she moved to where he was sitting and put her arms around him. They stayed like that, in silence punctuated only by sobbing, for a long time.

The tea went cold. Kolya hung his head and waited, suddenly thinking of his grandmother.

* * *

Claudia made Haruki promise to stay until the rain stopped. He weakly agreed.

The rain didn’t stop for four days.

Haruki noticed that each time he stayed at the cottage, he stayed for four days. And each time, he could never have predicted how much would change before the next  visit. The next time he visited would be many years later, and again it was under circumstances he would never have foreseen.

But that time, the third time he stayed at the cottage bordered by wheat fields, he was taken into a home that was warm and comforting, filled with memories of Klaus and those who carried memories of Klaus. And by being there, he learned, slowly, to talk about him.

He also began to realise, when he and Claudia were alone, that she somehow knew what Haruki and Klaus had shared. He had never been sure, and he couldn’t think when Klaus had had a chance to tell her, but he was relieved.

He stayed in the little room that had once housed an ancient boiler, in which Taki had once slept, and he himself had slept when he stayed at the cottage the first time. Kolya slept on the couch in the living room.

At first, Wilhelm wasn’t entirely on board with the tall, handsome Eurotean’s presence in the house. He sometimes caught Eva throwing him a guilty, surreptitious look or two, and he could have sworn he caught Claudia doing the same. But Wilhelm came to value Kolya's company when he observed the emperor's knight doing what he could to help around the small house and especially when he offered to lug the heavy harvest machines back into the shed, which Wilhelm didn’t get a chance to do before the rain started.

And Verner also took an immediate liking to him when he came round the next day, hoping for a hand with the same.

‘You’re a big fella,’ he observed when he saw Kolya standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Kolya looked nonplussed, unused to the language and even less used to Verner’s accent. But when Haruki explained, Kolya was happy to head next door with Verner. And he and Verner developed an unexpected bond, due mostly to the fact that Kolya reminded Verner of his own son, whom he greatly missed.

'Rudi's a knight, too,' he told Kolya proudly, more than once.

Haruki and Wilhelm’s friendship also came as a mild surprise to everyone. Wilhelm had worked as an engineer for the past ten years refining and developing mining technology and Haruki found himself asking questions about it. Claudia served dinner around their conversations with a smile.

They also discussed politics, particularly what was about to take place in the east. They occasionally heard talk of it on the news. The choice that Meiji was about to lay at his nation’s feet. It was something the emperor had spoken to Haruki about on the day he received his katana. Something Haruki had also discussed with Klaus at length.

‘Big decision,’ Wilhelm said. ‘Reducing the function of the throne to what? Ceremony? It would be a monarchy without any real power.’

‘It would,’ Haruki replied. ‘Meiji-sama wants to make sure that what happened in the last war doesn’t happen again, at the hands of just one leader. He’s putting the decision to our people in a referendum, so everyone will have a chance to have a say.’

Haruki remembered being startled when the emperor had asked for his opinion. He had tried telling Meiji that such things weren’t for him to decide.

‘On the contrary,’ Meiji had said. ‘I think it’s precisely for you and those like you to decide. You, after all, will be able to see with the eyes of the young. You will be able to see it all clearly.’

He had smiled mysteriously. Haruki didn’t know those were words that Meiji had borrowed from someone else.

Though Haruki had never before dealt with politics in such an abstract sense, nor had he had the time to do so in the years since had been made Commander, the feeling he had was almost instinctive. It came to him quite readily.

And when he replied, when he spoke with a humility that was both powerful and reserved, it made Meiji smile once more. Haruki spoke of all he had learned in the west, all he had learned in the east. He remembered his old, shelved passion of the intricacies of technology; how that passion had allowed him to see the ways cultures borrowed from another in the simplest of things. How each preserved their identity while enriching the other’s. He spoke of how their nation’s isolationism never made sense to him and how their veneration of tradition had become a point of oppression, rather than pride. He spoke of how their people, now, might be able to see things clearer. In the wake of mistakes made by their leaders.

The eyes of the young, Meiji thought. Taki, it appeared, had made the right call yet again.

Haruki had shared it all with Klaus in the coming days, as they lay together in their bed in Cena. Those were the heavier conversations they had had, the ones that had resulted in long, thoughtful silences. And Klaus had mulled over what it meant. Whether it would have changed Taki in any way. His sense of duty, his vows and his distance. Whether it would have changed everything or nothing at all.

Perhaps this was the new world, Klaus thought. The new world that Taki had wanted him and Haruki to build.

Sitting at the table in the kitchen, Haruki remembered those days again, vividly. Klaus’ gentle responses. The way his hand had absently run through Haruki’s hair. How even abstract, faraway things like the future of the east seemed to become real when Klaus spoke of it. When they spoke of it together.

Wilhelm didn’t notice Haruki’s preoccupation.

‘I wish my son could be more like you,’ he remarked. ‘That boy's head is in the clouds. Always has been.’

Haruki pulled himself back and glanced up with a smile.

‘I was like that too, at his age,’ he assured him.

Wilhelm sometimes remembered, with a twinge of self-loathing, how wrong he had once been about the east, and particularly those who had come from the east. He remembered his awful first words to Taki Reizen and he was grateful he had had the chance, over the years, to make it up to him. He hoped he had done the same for Klaus.

* * *

Although Claudia had apologised for the fact that she would sometimes break down over the silliest of things, to her surprise, and to Haruki’s, they both found that they sometimes also laughed at the silliest of things. At Eva’s fond complaints about her boyfriend and the way she turned red when Claudia warned that he seemed like he might pop the question at any moment. Verner’s perplexed face when he returned Kolya to them and couldn’t understand how he had managed to singlehandedly haul a faulty tractor into the shed.

And even over stories of Klaus. Stories of his antics when he was very little. The dresses that Claudia made him wear. The day he sprang behind Claudia’s skirt when the frog he had been inspecting suddenly swelled and croaked. The day he shaved the cat. They laughed quietly between themselves.

The family photo album showed only stiff collars and expressions.

‘They never capture the moments we want them to,’ Claudia lamented with a smile. ‘But I’ll never forget the times when he was my little Klaus. It was like he belonged to me and no one else.’ Tears dotted her eyes suddenly, like they tended to do in those days. She took a deep breath. ‘But in the end…’

Though their silences of late hadn't been painful, that time it was. Haruki felt a familiar stab. An old thorn. He didn’t know where Claudia had intended to take her words, but he filled them in himself.

In the end, Klaus had only ever belonged to one. He had only ever been knight to one.

He closed the album on the kitchen table and glanced up at the rose-engraved vase with its small missing piece. It contained a different kind of flower; long and orchid-like. He then glanced out the back window. The rain was easing gently. He and Claudia were alone in the house that evening; Eva had already left for college, Wilhelm was in town and Kolya was at Verner’s again.

Though Wilhelm didn’t notice Haruki’s preoccupation the previous night at dinner, Claudia noticed it then. She had a glimpse into the kind of pain he must be feeling, that terrible, nuanced pain over what had happened, which she herself had tried to understand when Emmerich described exactly how Klaus had died.

She put a hand on his. He looked down in surprise.

‘The last time I spoke to him,’ she said, ‘was when I called him on his birthday. He would have been here, in this kitchen.’

Haruki recalled that he had been there too, sitting at the table, fixing the gramophone.

 _‘I’m sorry we couldn’t make it back there, Klaus,’_ Claudia had said. _‘I hate that you’re alone on your birthday.’_

Haruki had gotten up to bring something back from the shed. Klaus’ eyes had followed him out.

‘I’m not,’ he told Claudia, when Haruki was out of earshot. ‘I’m here with Haruki.’

 _‘With Haruki?’_ Claudia had said in surprise.

And so Klaus told her. A month later, in the same kitchen, Claudia relayed it all to Haruki. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Klaus had described their trip, and their plans for the future. Haruki felt a heavy weight on his chest, pressing down.

‘And then I asked him something I had asked him once before, many years ago,’ Claudia said, very quietly. ‘I asked if you made him happy. And you know what he said?’

Klaus stood behind them, leaning against the wall with the phone held to his ear. He smiled at the floor.

‘Every day,’ he said. ‘Every second I’m with him.’

The words shot straight to Haruki’s head and made him feel dizzy. He got to his feet suddenly and walked to the window, a hand in his hair, with a strange sense that each breath was only filling his lungs partway.

Claudia watched him through fresh tears.

‘He heard that I was crying and told me to get a hold of myself,’ she recalled with a small laugh.

Haruki stared across the lawn, all the way down to the rabbit-proof fence, still feeling like there wasn’t enough air. The feeling had hit him so strongly that he was sure it had left a colour inside him permanently, something that would be tender and sweet and terrible for the rest of his life.

‘I’ve never heard him say that before,’ Claudia said softly. ‘About anyone.’

Haruki was still caught up in it. In that feeling. He was with Klaus at the edge of the genkan where they had made love for the last time.

Claudia’s heart broke all over again. She thought of all that Klaus had said and wondered at the possibility that there was something Haruki hadn’t considered.

‘Is there any more you could have given him?’

Haruki turned to her. It took him a few seconds to understand.

‘No,’ he said finally. He heard and felt how pathetic it was. He had given all, every piece of himself, and still it hadn't been enough. Klaus had still left him.

Claudia smiled. ‘Then you have nothing to regret. Nothing at all.’

* * *

It happened then. Something that allowed Haruki to pull himself out of the pit. Something small, but something that was true and precious, and something that he hadn’t thought about until Claudia mentioned it.

He realised he had revelled in each moment. There hadn’t been a single second he had taken for granted.

He thought of all the times he had spent with Klaus during the months they had together, and particularly during the vaguely surreal whirlwind love of their final few weeks. He thought of all of the times he had stared at Klaus’ face when he was asleep, thinking of how foreign and beautiful and perfect he was and that he couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to be there and be able to touch him.

When they made love on the edge of the genkan, that final time, Haruki had cried. Startled and worried, Klaus had almost pulled out, but Haruki had held him in place and told him to keep going, to please not stop because he was fine, he was fine, and he was sorry, and to please keep going. And so Klaus had thrust again, and Haruki had cried and clung to him and said that he loved him and Klaus whispered it back and realised he was crying too but he hid it in Haruki’s shoulder. Afterwards, after Haruki had calmed down, he was mortified, and he couldn’t explain it to himself, let alone to Klaus. But when Klaus raised his head, Haruki noticed his eyes were also red. And Klaus had smiled and said, ‘Goddamn pathetic pair of wolves we are.’ And they had laughed weakly. And they stayed there for a long time, Haruki trailing his fingers over Klaus’ chest and arms in figure-eights and swirls.

He had never once pushed Klaus away. He had held onto Klaus with both hands. He had drowned in every sensation, every touch, every word. He had loved earnestly and with his whole body. He had yearned for Klaus for so long that he had treasured everything they had, everything Klaus had given, sometimes with tremulous disbelief, with urgent, moonstruck love.

And he had made Klaus happy, he realised, tears pouring once more. Klaus had been happy. Klaus had been happy.

It was real, it had happened, and it would always be theirs.

* * *

Haruki awoke on his final morning at the cottage feeling like all of his muscles were sore. It was as though they were heavy with the memory of pain like it was a liquid weight, and it had all been wrung out of him as he slept. The result was a ginger sort of tenderness.

A few hours later, he wandered down the short, quiet street outside the station, waiting for Kolya to buy their tickets. Kolya, to Haruki's surprise, had wanted to try his hand at applying the new words and phrases that he had picked up from Verner.

There was still some time before their train was due to arrive. It had stopped raining but the sky was still a blanket of clouds. The memory of rain lingered, hanging in little drops from the ends of leaves. A woman walked with her small blonde son up ahead, letting him splash in the puddles even as she held his hand tightly.

Haruki walked past the bus stop where Taki had once given a few mouthy, racist locals the surprise of their lives. He thought about how he had found Kaiser at a bus shelter. He remembered how much he came to regret the fact that Kaiser had followed him. If Kaiser had remained, at least he would have been alive.

But now, he remembered the way Kaiser had once been. His hunched form, his bedraggled, matted fur and watery eyes. He would have been alive, Haruki realised. But he wouldn’t have been living.

_You saved me, you know. More than once._

Before he left the cottage, over their last cup of tea where they purposefully spoke of only lighthearted matters, Claudia had let one little thing of importance slip.

‘I know you won’t believe me. But it’ll happen for you again. What you were to him, you'll find for yourself.'

Despite his gratitude for her words and for everything she had done, Haruki had only managed a hollow smile. He couldn't begin to explain to her how wrong she was. Nothing and no one else would ever compare to Klaus. All that had happened, all that he could have hoped for, was that he learned enough to try to understand why Klaus had done what he had done, and learned enough to be able to live on without him.

He thought of the future, and it swam out at him from under grey clouds. He thought of the referendum that would take place in a few days. The world he would help build. He wondered, for the first time, about letting go of his command.

And then he noticed it; a colour, in the corner of his eye. A light in the gloom of that overcast day. And he turned. Across the road, growing in a hedge outside a small house, were the open, earnest yellow flowers that had once grown in a forgotten corner of the Fifteenth Armoured Division.

* * *

Maja Schiff was well into her seventies and had lived in her little home near the train station for many decades. And one of the strangest things that happened to her took place on an overcast day. She answered the door to a young, handsome man from the east, wearing a long jade military coat. He had soulful brown eyes which, despite the warmth of his smile, carried a deep sadness. He spoke her language perfectly and apologised for the intrusion.

And, to her surprise, he asked whether she knew the name of a flower which grew in the hedge outside her home.

‘Of course,’ she replied, taking slow steps outside. He kept pace with her patiently and helped her down the front steps. ‘I’ve been planting them for years. They’re called daylilies.’[*](http://media.americanmeadows.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/500x/2664a1c26d20ff89f08769f165108d16/h/e/hemerocallisstelladoro_7.jpg)

‘Daylilies,’ the Easterner repeated slowly, in his deep, pleasant voice.

‘Beautiful things,’ she said. ‘And sad too. Tricky to keep planting, you know. It takes a learned hand.’

‘Why's that?’

‘Well, they’re called daylilies because they only flower for one day. They bloom in the morning and before you know it, _poof!_ They’re gone by sunset.’ 

She plucked one for him with a smile while Haruki suddenly remembered a car with chipped red paint parked by the side of the road, waiting for them to find a flower that Klaus was sure had been there two weeks ago.

‘But they’re quite a sight while they last, aren’t they?’ Maja continued, turning to him with the small yellow lily in her hand.

She could never be sure if tears had come to the young Easterner’s eyes in that moment or if, in her old age, her eyesight had momentarily failed her.

* * *

Before daylilies came roses.

And before roses came wisteria.

And each flower, in its own way, had a place during those final few weeks.

A little over a month ago, in the Reizen residence, Klaus winked over his shoulder at Haruki.

And he turned to climb the stone steps to the shrine that was encased in the green canopy of the treetops.

It was small but echoing, in the way that shrines in that country sometimes were. He passed from the world of the living to the world of the divine as he stepped through the arch of the toori, past the small entrance where a large bell hung from the centre of the ceiling, its weathered rope trailing on the floor. And up a shorter flight of steps was the shrine itself.

There was nothing of Taki there that he could see. Only his name in its artful strokes of kanji atop a table covered in offerings, small bowls and incense.

But the entire surface of the shrine, and the floor around it, was covered in roses.

White roses and red. Rich and beautiful. Their scent overpowering. Each one keeping secrets in their closed, velvet petals.

Klaus was overcome. He walked through them carefully, nudging them aside, trying not step on any of them.

And he stopped before the small shrine itself. He tried to feel for him. Incense trailed into the air in wispy curls.

In a clearing in the west, over ten years ago, Taki had lain with Klaus and they had listened to a creek jumping from mossy step to step. And Taki had his dream for the first time. He saw them as they had been through all of their lives. He had seen their curse, the curse that bound them to one another whether or not it brought them pain, and a bond that would be torn time and time again. He had seen his own death, and Klaus’, countless times. He had seen how much they had longed for the time together they never had. For a happiness that always eluded them.

In their final lives, Taki had given them the time together that they didn’t have before. But he understood, when he fell sick, that theirs was a fate that would always end in tragedy, right until the end. And so he did what he could to break the curse, at least for Klaus. He had imagined Klaus living out the rest of his days with Haruki. He had hoped that Klaus would make the right choice.

There was a long pause.

Klaus stared at Taki’s name on the small marble ledge before he stepped closer and placed something on the altar. Then he stepped back and picked up one of the white roses. Velvet petals beneath his hand. A smell that was like Klaus' second half. He held it gently in his palm.

The maiden rose that was, once again, pure in death.

‘Hey, Taki.’

His voice rang out softly before being absorbed by stone and wood.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say. But he thought he knew where to start.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, barely audible in either world. ‘I’m sorry for everything I did. And everything I couldn’t do. I hope I did right by you, in the end.’

Taki was as silent as he had been in life.

Klaus thought of Haruki, who waited for him at the base of the stone steps.

‘I hope I can do right by him, too.’

His golden gaze remained on cold stone for a long time.

‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘Every day. I think about you every day.’ And then it came to him, slowly, like it had been waiting for the right moment. ‘But now, it doesn’t hurt.’

He let the simple fact settle in him. A small, warm glow in the centre of his chest. He stared somewhere at the base of the altar and remembered listening to the soft notes of an old Reinhart record.

And he realised it wasn’t only the grief of losing Taki. None of it hurt. His past mistakes, his inadequacy, his feeling that he had failed Taki time and time again, his sense that he could never break through and his sense that he would never be good enough. His pure, longing, aching love. It wasn’t gone, and he knew none of those feelings would ever leave him. But none of it hurt him anymore.

He thought of long, slender hands and hair that fell into deep brown eyes.

‘The kid really is a miracle worker.’

And he thought about the love that burned in him for Haruki. He thought of the letter in the front pocket of his jacket. The letter which would be lost in a sudden, terrible fire that would take out an entire valley of No Man’s Land.

‘Thank you for sending me to him,’ he said quietly.

He stayed there for another few minutes, until he was sure that the few tears he shed wouldn’t show in his eyes when he returned to Haruki. He thought in bemusement of how much he had cried in the few short days since their final night in Cena.

‘You've probably noticed that the kid’s also milking me dry,’ he said wryly, and smiled when he imagined a Hasebe-like _kami_ at Taki’s elbow gasping in horror at the foreigner’s impiety in a holy shrine. He imagined Taki smiling gently.

‘I'll see you when I get up there,’ he promised, his tone light, his smile wide and all trace of tears gone. ‘Can't wait to hear all the things you've been saving up to tell me.’

His smile flickered then, just a little.

‘I love you,’ he said.

_I always will. I never once stopped._

And Taki watched as he turned and left, his large silhouette sinking as he descended the steps. On the altar behind him, in a small space Klaus had created among the roses, was a small sprig of wisteria.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue coming soon.
> 
> #in denial that I'm nearly finished


	70. Epilogue

_SIX YEARS LATER_

The temple bells had chimed many times since that year. Each time, the bells rang in the start of a new cycle. A new cycle of seasons, a new cycle of life.

The roses in a small garden in the west had blossomed and wilted several times over. In the east, the wisteria tree still rustled, petals escaping on the wind and new petals growing all the time. In a different nation in the west, a nation of mandolins and inky black seas, daylilies glowed brightly over the course of their short lives.

And Haruki Yamamoto was awoken on the morning of his thirtieth birthday by the shrill ringing of the telephone.

 _‘Haruki-chan!’_ a high voice exclaimed in his ear, far too loudly.

Haruki winced and smiled.

 _‘Pipe down, for God’s sake,’_ he heard Ryoumei mutter somewhere in the background. _‘You’ll turn him deaf. He already can’t walk.’_

Sakura clicked her tongue at her father.

 _‘Don’t interrupt, Otousan!’_ she chided. Her voice became sweet again when she spoke to Haruki. _‘Otousan says it’s your birthday. Happy birthday, Haruki-chan!’_

‘Thanks, Sakura,’ he said warmly.

_‘Otousan says you’re in the west. Are you in the west?’_

‘Yeah. Been here for four days.’

_‘Otousan says you’re teaching people how to fly. Are you teaching people how to fly?’_

‘I am.’

_‘Is it fun? Do you get to fly every day?’_

‘No. Not yet, anyway. I just stand in front of a bunch of people and talk. It’s kind of boring.’

_‘I bet it’s not boring when you do it, Haruki-chan!’_

_‘Okay, that’s enough,’_ Ryoumei said, sounding annoyed. His voice got louder the closer the came to the phone. _‘Scram.’_

 _‘I’m not done talking to Haruki-chan!’_ Sakura complained, sounding distant.

_‘Yes, you are. Go make me coffee.’_

Haruki smiled and flexed his leg out, hoping it wouldn’t cause him much trouble that day.

 _‘Hey,’_ Ryoumei said gruffly when he came on the line.

‘Is she even tall enough to reach the counter?’

 _‘She stands on a stool,’_ he said carelessly. _‘She’s still in love with you, if you can’t tell. She barely remembered my birthday.’_

Haruki chuckled. ‘She adores you. Every second word she says is _Otousan._ ’

Ryoumei grunted but Haruki could tell he was smiling.

_‘So, how’s thirty feel?’_

‘Like sixty.’

 _‘Well, that makes_ me _feel great,’_ said Ryoumei, who was several months older.

‘I’ve got the cane and the limp to go with it,’ Haruki reminded him.

They spoke at length of Sakura and Keiko and Haruki’s first few days at his new job. Keeping the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, Haruki picked up the receiver and walked slowly and gingerly to the kitchen, trailing the cord.

Just before they hung up, there was a telltale pause.

 _‘How’re you doing?’_ Ryoumei asked.

It was something he had asked often in the past six years. Every few months, just in case. And Haruki appreciated his concern. He knew it came from a place of love. And so he replied like he always did, for Ryoumei’s sake.

‘Better.’

In some ways it was the truth. But in other ways, in ways that were more important, it was a lie. And Ryoumei knew it was a lie.

It had been the truth once, when Haruki returned from the cottage six years ago and Ryoumei had heard the difference in his voice. But since then, Haruki had remained exactly there. In a place where he had learned to live with the pain, rather than learning to let the pain go. The talon clutch was still there, and his heart continued to beat within it.

After Haruki prepared breakfast, showered and dressed, he gathered his teaching materials and left his flat. He lived a short walk from the flight school, but with his limp, it took him twice as long as it should have.

It was an injury he received a few months ago in the east. Since leaving the army, he had noticed that he was getting noticeably thinner and so he had picked up his old shinai to try to get back into shape. During one of his practices, he pushed himself too far with moves he hadn’t tried in years and he fell, twisting his leg and opening an old, long scar on his left shin, one that had been left there by a passing bullet.

He had driven himself to the hospital, trying not to remember the arm that had pulled him to his feet that day, seconds after the bullet grazed him.

Months after the accident, his doctor didn’t understand why he didn’t seem to be improving in any real way. Though he had managed to get the bleeding to stop on the day itself, the scar seemed to take too long to close back up, and then it kept opening again and again, at the slightest of wrong turns.

And the doctor was both relieved and vaguely unsettled at how Haruki seemed to take it all in his stride. As though he had resigned himself to it. To such senseless pain.

After Haruki left the army, after he quietly wrapped the gun that had never before left his side and put it away, he had tried delving back into old passions. Fixing things. Designing things, improving old models of things, putting things back together.

Nothing he tried seemed to work. He would be left staring at a mess of pieces before him, blueprints that didn’t resolve into anything, things that were worse off than they had been before. And he found, again, that it didn’t come with the kind of frustration he knew he ought to feel. It was as though he knew it would happen. He had known long ago, though in a different sense, that Klaus had been the one who had given him his strength. So it made sense that he would be the one to take it all away.

And since the day Klaus kissed his hand at the foot of Onokami, Haruki hadn’t touched another human being. The only time he had come close was the night he drunkenly kissed Kolya and asked him for something that now made his insides writhe whenever he remembered it. He never made that mistake again with anyone else. And he barely registered the fact that it had been six years. In his mind, it had only been one long day that stretched endlessly in both directions.

* * *

It was Ryoumei’s idea that he try his hand at teaching.

Haruki started in a flight school in the east, which was only too eager to hire a retired, decorated commander and airman, and Haruki found that teaching came to him quite naturally. It gave him a new kind of satisfaction to know that his years in the air weren’t a complete waste, especially given that the _Sagi_ had remained shut away in the hangar since Klaus touched her down on the private runway.

Then came an offer for a temporary position in his old flight school in the west. To relieve a tenured professor for the rest of that year. And Haruki had almost turned it down. With his leg in that state, the mere idea of moving abroad was exhausting.

And yet, for a reason that he didn’t at all understand, he heard himself accepting the offer over the phone. He would wonder, later, whether it owed to nostalgia of some kind.

Ryoumei had been surprised but cautiously hopeful.

And Haruki had left his large, empty house behind for a small apartment in the west.

And, though he was almost sure it was his imagination, his leg began to improve over the first few days there. He found he was able to put more weight on it, sometimes even without his cane.

And there were other things. Little things. The projector had broken down on his first day in front of a room full of foreign students, and he was told it was faulty and had been breaking down for years. Against those odds, he had been able to fix it in a handful of minutes and even received an exuberant round of applause that made him laugh. He had been able to feel ripples of happiness, brief though they were, in simple things, like in the effervescent voice of the daughter of his oldest friend.

He wondered why. He wondered what had changed.

He often thought back to the few days he had spent with Claudia and the family six years ago. The few days that had taught him to make sense of what he could, to stop blaming himself and to live with the grief. He felt vaguely guilty about the fact that he and Claudia had lost touch after that, but he had a feeling she understood why that had to be. He wondered if it was time to pay the cottage another visit, now that he was back in the country. Perhaps he would when he had some time off in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, he was still getting to know his new students. That morning, the morning of his fourth day, he was scheduled to take a class of students whom he hadn't met yet; the oldest cohort at the school whose test flights were only in a few months. He remembered the excitement of that time of his life. And he realised, with a start, that he was now standing where Captain Vincenzo Corelli had once stood.

They were an animated bunch. Light-hearted young men, as well as a handful of women, all casually arrogant as pilots tended to be. Haruki took to them at once. And he was pleased and surprised to find, just as he had found in all of his other classes, that he hadn’t been received with any of the xenophobia he had expected, and indeed had dealt with in his time as a student. Beyond a few strange looks in the hallways, it seemed people were happy to accept him. In fact, his students were eager to know about the things he had done as commander of an entire armoured division in the east, and he told them the stories that he was able to relive without any pain.

The students, for their part, found they liked and respected their new professor immediately. They were struck by his quiet dignity, his reserve, and the light that came from him occasionally in short bursts, in a smile or a laugh.

The last few who filed out of the lecture hall that morning, however, wondered about the quiet cloak of sadness that claimed him when he stood alone at the front of the room.

Haruki remained there for a while, hearing the buzz of the fluorescent lights above him, absorbing the silence that reminded him of the large, empty home he had left behind in the east. The lecture hall was on the edge of the campus and its long window overlooked part of the runway outside. He saw a plane taxi away slowly, lights blinking, contemplating take off. And with a slight surprise, he remembered it was his birthday.

He glanced back down at the desk. He had asked for the personal files of each student and realised he had too much to carry back to his office in one trip. Carrying half the files under his right arm, testing the weight he could put on his cane and left leg, Haruki walked slowly to the door. He heard loud, fast footsteps echoing in the hallway outside and didn’t think anything of them.

Until he reached the doorway, through which a large figure suddenly careened without any warning and collided with him. 

Haruki stumbled back, his wound spiking in sharp pain, and he landed on the floor, manila files and papers scattering, his cane dancing out of reach. He let out a loud grunt, hands moving automatically to the fresh, searing pain in his leg, before he looked up. And the wind was knocked out of his lungs for a second time.

Klaus stood in the doorway, staring down at him, looking slightly startled.

* * *

For the past four days, twenty-one-year-old Heinrich Strauss had been feeling restless and he had no idea why. He hadn't been able to focus in class. He hadn’t been able to sleep properly. His friends noticed that he would lose his train of thought in the middle of his own sentences. Heinrich wondered if it was the slowly building pressure of his test flight, which loomed a few short months away.

As he walked from class to class, he would sometimes glance over his shoulder, feeling like he had missed something; something that had passed around the corner just before he turned.

On the third day, he had rifled aimlessly through his trunk and found a small red model airplane that he had entirely forgotten about. He vaguely remembered taking it off the shelf in the kitchen back at the cottage on the day he found out about his uncle’s death. He didn’t realise he had thrown it into the trunk that he would take to school with him. And he certainly didn't understand why he hadn't noticed it in all the intervening years. He placed it on the windowsill above his desk and stared at it in puzzlement for a few moments.

That night, he hadn’t been able to sleep at all. He tossed and turned and listened to his roommate snore. And it wasn’t until he watched the blue light of dawn seep slowly into his room that he finally fell asleep.

When he awoke again, it was mid-morning. He sat up in shock and realised he had almost completely missed his first class. And his attendance that year had been patchy at best, due to his private conviction that he was now beyond academic lessons and only the sky could teach him anything new. He had been given his last warning by a professor who, though Heinrich had forgotten in his slight panic, had taken leave for the rest of the year.

He had a handful of minutes left before the end of class. He pulled on a clean shirt and sprinted from the dorm, hoping he could sweet-talk the ageing professor into cutting him a break, just that once.

* * *

And for a ridiculous moment after he barrelled through the doorway of the lecture hall, he thought it was Taki Reizen he had just knocked to the ground.

At any rate, he certainly wasn’t looking at the senile old Professor Traub. The Easterner sprawled on the floor, clutching his left leg, was young and strikingly beautiful, despite the fact that his face was twisted in a strange mixture of pain and shock. He wore a tight-fitting black vest and his hair fell forwards into his eyes. His briefcase and files were scattered around him. And off in the background, beyond the window, the small plane that had been considering the sky lifted its nose gently into the air and left the tarmac.

Heinrich felt his chest throbbing from the impact of a collision that had been entirely his fault.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘Shit. Sorry, prof. I really knocked you back, there.’

Even though Taki had died when Heinrich was young, he still carried strong memories of him, and there was something of him – a great deal of him – in the Easterner he was looking at now. So it had taken him a second to avail himself of that mistake.

A mistake that was identical to Haruki’s, though it didn’t carry nearly the same weight.

Haruki still stared.

It was Klaus. It was so close to being Klaus that Haruki was sure he had to be dreaming. The same golden hair and golden eyes and strong jaw and immense arms. He didn't see the incriminating details that gave Heinrich away. The fact that he was an inch or two taller than his uncle. The fact that his features had borrowed a bit more from his mother and made his face more refined and handsome; something in the line of his nose and mouth.

And there was no scar. None of the little lines and amicable creases that had so perfectly weathered Klaus' face and bore the joys and sorrows of all his thirty-seven years. But Haruki didn't see this. Even if the existence of a nephew had managed to swim at him through the haze, he wouldn't have been able to see past the photos that he had spied in the cottage six years ago, of a lanky fifteen-year old in a cadet uniform.

On top of all that, Haruki had seen glimpses of Klaus over the years in strange places. In a stranger's long, confident stride. In the glint of blonde hair in the sun. He had done double-takes, heart in his mouth, far more times than he was proud of. A part of him had always been waiting for Klaus. A very small part of him was still convinced that Klaus hadn't died that day in No Man's Land, that he was still out there, and that Haruki had only to wait.

And so, with irrefutable proof now standing before him, his mind only played the one name.

And then Heinrich spoke.

His voice, which was similar to Klaus' but nonetheless qualitatively different, was what finally pulled Haruki out of his seconds-long delusion. He fell to Earth hard and felt briefly winded, for the third time in a few short seconds, at his own stupidity. Even more so at his embarrassment when it finally occurred to him who the kid must be.

Luckily, it appeared that Heinrich was equally abashed. He stared down at the professor in concern. He offered a hand.

And when Heinrich said the same three words that Klaus had first said to him all those years ago, when Haruki reached up and was pulled swiftly to his feet, he had that sense again that he might wake up in a different time. Perhaps he would wake up six years ago in his office and Kaiser would glance up and wag his tail. Or perhaps he would wake up in his dorm ten years before that, with Ryoumei waking him urgently and reminding him that Taki-sama was arriving from the west that day, and that there was a rumour he was bringing a Westerner with him as his knight.

* * *

When Haruki and Heinrich saw one another in that lecture hall in Haruki’s old flight school, it wasn’t quite like the moment when Kolya saw Meiji for the first time, nor the moment when Klaus brushed aside the arms of wisteria and met the spellbinding gaze of a boy who stood on the other side.

For one thing, there was the fact that it wasn't the first time they saw one another. They had met once before, briefly, when Heinrich was thirteen.

For another thing, they had each mistaken the other for someone else.

So the feeling that went through them in that moment, strong though it was, was hard to identify exactly. They couldn't be sure whether it was a force from within or without. Something to do with simple chance encounters and coincidence or something larger – a force that played with beings on Earth in small, devious ways and brought about sweeping consequences.

All Heinrich knew was that the restlessness he had experienced over the past few days had come to a head and resolved, for a reason that didn't take him long to understand. And Haruki, who would need much longer, who would go through a great deal more pain before he reached the place that it took Heinrich only a few seconds to reach, found himself thinking of much simpler things in that moment. He thought of a projector that had come together under his hand the previous day. He thought of how he had laughed for the first time in a long time.

And, whatever the case may have been regarding fated encounters, they both definitely had the sense that they were each echoes of men who had become legends.

* * *

Men who seemed to come to life in that moment, even if was for just a moment.

Even if it was in the few seconds after a chance misunderstanding, even if only in the eyes of another, it was like they were there again. Alive again. They met for a second time in the world of the living before they fell gently back into a place that was theirs alone. One that greatly resembled a clearing in the west where a thin stream zig-zagged its way over mossy rocks, singing merrily, and where a wolf slept soundly by its master's side.

And whether it had always been written or not, whether by their own hand or by the hand of another, it so happened that after traversing east and west, after reaching the ends of the Earth and back, after years of falling apart and coming back together, they came to rest there, finally, in a world that was theirs alone, on the other side of the sky.

 

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my amazing, unearthly, angelic, downright wonderful readers-sama,
> 
> I have too many emotions right now. Relief, mostly. And this strange, aching sadness. Also this numb sense that it's not actually over. I’m hoping it’s denial rather than my subconscious telling me I’ve forgotten a really important chapter. I posted the one where it turns out Klaus didn’t actually die, right? (Okay, that joke was in poor taste even for me…)
> 
> A few notes:
> 
> \- Klaus’ decision. Believe it or not, I initially wanted to give him a happy ending, despite my love of tragedy. And then one day, I unexpectedly imagined his death. I was horrified. I tried to box up the idea and push it far away like it was a loaded gun. But the next day, I realised it was something I had to do. It felt like something Klaus himself wanted, and I had no choice. *Dionys’ therapist raises eyebrows and takes notes
> 
> \- On a lighter note (or not), daylilies are real, as are their poignantly sad lifespans. When I was trying to decide what Klaus’ flower for Haruki would be, I found them just by looking up ‘bright yellow flowers’ :(
> 
> \- I listened to a lot of different playlists as I wrote, but the one song that I kept coming back to and never lost its effect in terms of how it captured Part 3, and Haruki’s point of view especially, is _[Fix You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4V3Mo61fJM)_ by Coldplay.
> 
> \- Haruki/Heinrich: there is a hint about what happens with them in "Chapter 42: Life, Everywhere". (Also I'm not sure yet whether to write their story. After everything we’ve been through to finally make it to the end of Part 3, I’m thinking it might be better left as an open ending, yes? Yes.)
> 
> \- One of my wonderful commenters recently picked up on the fact that Haruki might look a lot like [Ivan from the manga _Mitsumei_](http://cdn.anisearch.com/images/manga/cover/full/20/20055.jpg), which is so true! Thank you again, Anon!
> 
> SIDE-STORIES  
> After taking a long break, I've started putting together all the side-stories that I didn’t have room for in this story! It's called [Secrets of Maiden Rose](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11226054/chapters/25084725).
> 
> It includes stories from Haruki's sexual past, plus Klaus/Haruki sex adventures that I didn’t have room for in the main story, plus the Sotaro/Meiji/Kolya backstory, plus Klaus/Taki things, plus AUs, plus more. Hope to see you there!
> 
> ABOUT ME  
> As lame as it sounds, for anyone who has actually read through all 400,000 words with me, I don’t want to be a single-pseudonym anymore.
> 
> My real name is Daniella Fernando, I have a few days left of being 26, and I live in Sydney, Australia with my large Mad Dog, Isaac. I was very close to being a lawyer once and I even wasted many confused/unhappy years of my life getting the degree. Now I work as a private tutor, which I love. Aside from loving my students and loving teaching in general, it also gives me a lot of free time to indulge in the highest echelons of art: Writing Gaye Porne. Haha!
> 
> Background-wise, I’m Sri Lankan (born and grew up in Abu Dhabi, long boring story) but I thought I’d mention the Sri Lankan part because I injected myself into the story as the dark-skinned girl who shamelessly hit on Klaus in a bar, offered to write his biography, and talked to him about life, love and suicide.
> 
> AND MOST IMPORTANTLY…  
> This story is easily the longest thing I’ve ever written. And while I’m proud of how much I wrote in a little over a year, I’m so much prouder of the fact that I gathered a readership as amazing as you guys.
> 
> I’m not exaggerating when I say this story wouldn’t have been written without you. There are not enough words in any language to express my gratitude for that. This applies to my kudosers/bookmarkers/subscribers and favouriters/followers, but more than anything, it applies to anyone who ever commented, on any chapter, even once. You’re the reason I was able to start each new chapter. Your comments made me laugh until I cried and sometimes moved me to actual tears and just UGH. You just light up the story.
> 
> Special mention has to go to Georgia, who has been such a huge part of this story for such a long time. Thank you for your love and your insight and your advice, my dear <3
> 
> Also I believe I discovered my soulmate in moratorium, whose comment below made me sob into my keyboard.
> 
> Finally, I'm sure you'll all join me in thanking the gods for Inariya-sama and her heartrendingly beautiful men and her amazing story.
> 
> Okay, that’s more than enough from me. I really, really hope you enjoyed this insanely long saga, everyone. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who joined me on the ride, it means so much. Hope to hear from you soon! Xxx


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